Nowzad charity founder Pen Farthing evacuated 67 Afghans and 162 animals from Kabul when it fell to the Taliban last August. He’s been managing the fallout ever since, discovers FRAN McELHONE when she meets him at his Exeter home
When I meet Pen Farthing a row is under way in the halls of Westminster over whether Boris Johnson personally authorised the evacuation of “pets over people” from Kabul.
“I don’t know,” Pen tells me when I ask him if the Prime Minister intervened. “If he did, then thank you very much, he did the right thing, because as a result, 67 Afghans, including children, have also started new lives in Devon. So, the line that this was a case of “pets over people” is just wrong,” he adds.
Pen is armed with three dogs when I arrive; Cory, Leif, and Ragnar. All are gentle and love cuddles. Then there’s Ewok, a Pomeranian who is essentially a ball of fluff and was imported into Afghanistan and taken on by Pen after most of its fur fell out through neglect.
Pen’s wife Kaisa – a Norwegian climbing instructor formerly with Ascend Afghanistan, an NGO empowering Afghan women through mountaineering – is a few minutes late to our photoshoot because she’s been baking Norwegian cinnamon buns, so their home, which the couple bought over Zoom while still in Kabul, has a warming aroma.
It’s a good choice, I muse, for the large outside space where their four dogs can roam. Pen, whose UK base before Exeter was Tiverton, ushers me in through the gate, leaving me just enough room to sidle in. “Oh, would they run off or something?” I ask him catching a keen glint in Cora’s eyes. “Yeah, they’d be off,” replies Pen. “They’ve all escaped before, though luckily not all at once.”
This canine quad is here, safe in Exeter, thanks to Operation Ark, the name given for the evacuation of 94 dogs and 68 cats which involved the animals being transported in crates on flatbed trucks from the Nowzad veterinary centre in Kabul’s midpoint to the airport. There, they were loaded into the plane’s cargo hold, with help from the US military.
Meanwhile, the cabin was a sea of empty seats. “We asked the government to put people on the plane,” says Pen, who chartered the aircraft himself, secured through a friend via LinkedIn.
He is clueless as to why the paperwork for the dual-national families who had waited for days in 45-degree heat at the airport’s sewerage strewn perimeter, wasn’t facilitated so the plane wasn’t utilised as it should have been. The British military had left, so the flight was the last one from Kabul destined for the UK.
By August there were 220 animals, including donkeys and goats, at the compound; the number of animals rose abruptly as the Taliban encroached on the city and expats dropped off their pets en route to the airport.
Pen and Kaisa’s hopes that they may have been able to stay and co-exist with the Taliban proved impossible. The Norwegian embassy instructed her to get out of the country. After an attempt to get into the airport failed during which she was crushed against a fence under the weight of the crowd, her escape involved her dressing as a local, several car changes, and a helicopter ride into the airport from a military base. The cabin of her plane was also empty.
Pen’s initial plan was to evacuate his staff and animals to India but when there weren’t enough crates, he had to take the “horrendous” decision to euthanise 32 older dogs. A further 16, part of the vaccination and neutering programme, were returned to the streets. If they’d been left to the Taliban they’d have been shot. This, Pen knew – it had already happened to friends’ animals.
The first evacuation attempt saw Pen’s two trucks and two busloads of staff being swarmed by 48 Taliban brandishing photos of military dogs attacking Guantanamo Bay inmates, asking Pen, “are those the dogs?”.
Then a suicide bomber struck just outside the airport killing at least 183 people – 170 Afghans and 13 US soldiers. Chaotic scenes ensued with the Taliban teargassing the fraught crowds. Pen’s driver Farid was rendered temporarily blind, so Pen took over, steering away from the airport back to the centre. Six cats died from the tear gas.
“The Taliban said we would take the dogs but not the staff,” Pen said. “So, we went back and had a good cry. We knew our staff wouldn’t be getting out via the airport.”
Pen was documenting the horror of it all via social media, broadcasting live to thousands of followers via Twitter and Facebook.
It feels that Nowzad, the animal welfare charity the 52-year-old founded in 2008, shortly after leaving the Royal Marines after 22 years’ service, has been politicised by the mainstream media amid the revelations in January that the Prime Minister may have authorised the plane to take off from Afghanistan. Meanwhile Pen has been made a fall guy for the government’s guffaws and a target for people’s frustrations over the handling of the withdrawal of coalition forces after 20 years.
In 24 hours, Pen received upwards of 50 requests for comment from journalists and had been up until 2am trawling the web reading all the news reports regarding the matter, personally responding to dozens of comments. Why bother? I suggest. “It’s about getting the truth out,” Pen sighs.
None of the reports, he said, mentioned the fact that Nowzad also secured the later evacuation of 67 Afghans, who were blocked by the Taliban from getting on the plane, to the UK via Pakistan. The plane containing the animals cost £500,000, while the evacuation of the staff and their families totted up a further £250,000, funded thanks to the generous donations of supporters – not the government.
Pen’s gang of supporters far outweigh the mob of haters who have sent him death threats and labelled him “evil”. But far worse than name calling is the impact the misinformation disseminated by the mainstream media has had. “Donors have cancelled their regular donations thinking we’ve misspent their money,” Pen tells me. “It’s absolutely heart-breaking.”
In all the coverage of Operation Ark, there has been little, if any, mention about the fact that Nowzad isn’t solely an animal charity: around 90 veterinary students from Kabul University, including several women who went on to become vets, were provided with vital training. So through the empowerment of women, the charity has played a significant role resetting the course of history for women in society, a situation which has sadly now been reversed.
There has been public criticism over whether the Nowzad staff were ever at risk from Taliban persecution. This is a hard to justify stance when in the months since the Taliban takeover, Taliban gunmen have raided the homes of numerous women’s rights activists and been accused of arresting, torturing and killing them, while single pregnant Afghan women have been pressured to give up their children. New York-based Human Rights Watch has reported that the Taliban have “rolled back the rights of women and girls, including blocking access to education and employment”.
At the time of writing, the country was teetering on the edge of a humanitarian disaster with the United Nations reporting in January that half of the population, 23 million people, were in “dire need of assistance”.
“The day the Taliban came into town our women were desperate, they went from being free to being covered up and not able to go out,” Pen says. “The West has abandoned them to that. “Kabul was a vibrant city; people went out for dinner, there were women everywhere. Now no one goes out and there are no women on the streets. We’ve had our offices raided twice. The Taliban took our vehicle and equipment.”
He adds: “We looked after the working dogs for the military, so if an interpreter is at risk from the Taliban for helping the military, so are the vets who were enabling their working dogs. They were in effect working on behalf of the International Security Assistance Force which is predominantly made up of US and British military personnel. We hid them in the middle of the dogs in the trucks.”
Pen’s eyes are glassy when recalling the barrage of contemptuous messages he’s received, but no matter how exhausted he feels and despite only smiling when I ask him to for the photos (and joking that there may not be enough cinnamon buns for me), his spirit remains unbroken and he still has plenty of fight left in him. He admits though, that he is “1,000 per cent stressed” about the charity’s future.
The most prolific argument against Nowzad’s animal welfare effort, is essentially that, while there are people who are suffering, resources should go to people instead. But there are resources in place for helping people in need. A need that will be interminable. So, does this mean that animals shouldn’t be helped?
Nowzad is a charity with compassion at its heart. Something Pen is brimming with. He reminds us, “it’s not possible to scoop up a child and look after it like you can with a dog.”
But, in the hope this goes some way to appeasing his critics, since the evacuation, the main focus of the charity has been on the people the charity sustained. “Work hasn’t stopped,” Pen explains, adding that since he returned to the UK, work has involved helping the staff and their families resettle as well as coordinating the adoption of the animals. Meanwhile, back in Kabul, the few, all-male, staff who remain are still trying to run the animal welfare programmes but are in a “beyond desperate” situation.
According to the World Bank, 75 per cent of Afghanistan’s public spending is funded by grants. Since the Taliban takeover, US President Biden cut off access to the billions of dollars of Afghan central bank reserves, held in US bank accounts, and the International Monetary Fund halted Afghanistan’s access to its funds: at street level, this has resulted in Afghan civilians unable to access their own bank accounts, not being paid and essentially, having no money to buy food.
“We’ve got funds, we just can’t get them to the clinic,” explains Pen whose first action every morning is to see if the banks have been unfrozen and money is available. “We’re not the only ones affected,” continues Pen. “On the WhatsApp group for all the heads of NGOs operating in Afghanistan, everyone is in the same situation.
“We were about to take on another vet and we wanted – still want – to expand to another country. But unless Biden opens the banks, nothing’s going to happen.”
Up until the pandemic hit, Pen was back and forth from the UK to Kabul. He is planning on returning, he just doesn’t know when.
“We left with just the clothes we had on, that’s it,” Kaisa tells me. “My stepmum had to take me shopping for underwear when I got home.
“We made a deal not to talk about our things, a lot of which we didn’t just need practically, but which have so many memories. We agreed whoever mentioned something we’d left behind next would buy the other a bottle of wine. I lost within 10 minutes. I just needed my jacket.”
I ask her if she likes living in Exeter. “Yeah, it’s nice,” she replies. She then starts talking about her disillusionment with the way our politicians behave, and the way the media has handled the recent spat about whether or not Boris did or didn’t do something.
“Pen is being used as a face for the debate over what the government did or didn’t do right,” she says. “The charity did what every charity did at the time, which was ask for help.”
Nowzad – the charity
During his six-month tour in Helmand in 2006, Pen, a Royal Marines Troop Sergeant, found a dog cowering in a forward operating base. His ears had been cut off, he was extremely timid, and Pen used military biscuits to coax him out. After a couple of days, Pen said, “we fell for each other”.
He named the dog he later had flown home to Devon, Nowzad, after the town he found him. Nowzad became the inspiration for the charity which has now reunited more than 1,700 soldiers all over the world with dogs and cats who provided them with companionship and solace while they fought on the front line.
As the charity grew it expanded its purpose, opening a clinic in central Kabul to train local vets, vaccinating dogs against rabies and running a neutering programme, and in recent years has also treated donkeys and goats.
It costs around £1 million to run Nowzad a year.
Nowzad’s female veterinarians
Nowzad has trained around 90 veterinary students from Kabul University.
Pen employed the first ever female Afghan nationals as veterinarians at the Nowzad clinic in Kabul.
All the female vets concur that the single most important thing, other than family support, that will help change attitudes and stifle gender inequality in Afghanistan, is education.
These young women had felt empowered by the improvement in security that British troops brought to Afghanistan. They were able to choose their own careers and support the rebuilding of their country by being part of the rebuilding process – as an equal member of society.
Pen says: “Two decades of change since the removal of the Taliban was making a difference. The West destroyed that on August 15, 2021 in a single day, by giving Afghanistan back to the Taliban without any concessions.
