Because America may well abandon you. George Packer writes about Janis Shinwari, an Afghan interpreter who saved the lives of American soldiers, and who operated in the open, without fear of the Taliban, because he trusted that the Americans would have his back. Army 1st Lt. Matt Zeller, whose life Shinwari saved, has been trying from his home back in the US to shake up the Washington bureaucracy and force them to move to protect this man who risked so much for America, and get him and his family safely to the US. Here’s the latest:

And, on September 3rd, Shinwari was suddenly informed that he and his family had been approved. He went to the American Embassy, where an immigrant visa was glued to his passport. He quit his job at Camp Blackhorse, said goodbye, and, after seven years of service to the U.S. Army, received a certificate of appreciation. He sold his house, his mattresses, his dishes, his car, his TV, and his radio—almost all his worldly goods—and moved his family to his father-in-law’s house for the two-week interval before the flight to Virginia, “because I thought I was going to a new country and starting a new life.”

This past Saturday morning, around eleven Kabul time, Shinwari got a phone call from the Embassy. “There is some problem with your visa,” an official said. “Can you bring it back today?”

“What kind of problem?”

The official wouldn’t say. Shinwari went to his computer and checked the status of his case. His and his wife’s applications had reverted from “ready” to “administrative processing” (his two children were still listed as “ready,” but yesterday they, too, went back to “administrative processing”). He called Zeller to report that his visa had been revoked. Zeller urged him not to present his passport at the Embassy, because the visa page would be stamped “cancelled,” and then he would return to bureaucratic limbo. Shinwari, with no job or possessions, no future, went into hiding. He wondered if some Taliban had sent an anonymous e-mail to the embassy to sabotage his case at the last minute.

Of the eight thousand seven hundred and fifty visas created for Afghan interpreters, just a thousand one hundred and fourteen have been issued. In the five years of the Iraqi S.I.V. program, eight thousand out of twenty-five thousand have gone through. So far this year, the number for Iraqis is down around three hundred sixty. As of September 30th, the Iraq program is scheduled to end, with thousands of visa slots unfilled. In July, the House passed a bill that would extend the program, with an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote of 420-3, nothing short of miraculous in this Congress. But the bill won’t come to the Senate floor until December, and, meanwhile, it stands to die in the House, where Republicans just passed a budget whose single priority is the defunding of Obamacare. Iraqis who attached their fates to the U.S. government in Iraq stand to be casualties of a U.S. government shutdown in Washington.

Can we please have the president and some senators get off their asses and rescue Janis Shinwari and the people like him? It’s about their lives, most of all, but it’s also about America’s honor.