An Afghan man I’ll call “Mohammed” saved my life. It was 2001, just over two months since the Sept. 11 attacks, when Mohammed drove me into Afghanistan as Kabul was falling. He spirited me through a Taliban checkpoint between Jalalabad and the capital, where, an hour or so later, a car full of journalists were brutally killed.
Mohammed found me, then a CBS News reporter, a safe place to stay in chaotic post-Taliban Kabul. That’s what a “fixer” is for a foreign correspondent: part translator, part driver, part MacGyver. Every time I returned to the country, I would check on him and his family. And if I asked, he would drive me to hell, and back.
In 2015, three men beat and stabbed Mohammed’s 18-year-old son, saying he was being…