DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Some of the foreign contractors who powered the logistics of America's "forever war" in Afghanistan now find themselves stranded on an unending layover in Dubai without a way to get home.

After nearly two decades, the rapid U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has upended the lives of thousands of private security contractors from some of the world's poorest countries — not the hired guns but the hired hands who serviced the American war effort. For years, they toiled in the shadows as cleaners, cooks, construction workers, servers and technicians on sprawling Am...