John Oliver opened Sunday’s edition of Last Week Tonight with his main story: America’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“America’s war there is drawing to a close after almost 20 years of fighting. We all knew the end was likely to be ugly, the only question was, how ugly? Well, this week, we got our answer,” said Oliver.
Footage of Afghans frantically trying to escape their Taliban-controlled country via the Kabul airport, with planes carrying as many as 800 Afghans—and some Afghans even falling from the sky—conjured comparisons to the 1975 evacuation of Saigon.
“Holy sh-t,” Oliver quipped at footage of a plane packed with people. “And the thing is, that is just the people that managed to get onto the plane. There were horrific videos—that we are not going to show you—of people clinging to the wheels of a plane and falling to their death as it took off. And while Biden insisted that ‘we planned for every contingency,’ that is pretty hard to believe given that just 10 days ago, the U.S. was desperately trying to negotiate with the Taliban asking to spare our embassy in Kabul; a day later, that embassy was told to destroy sensitive files; and by this time last week, we were evacuating it altogether.”
Oliver then threw to footage of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who denied that the U.S. embassy in Kabul was indeed closed and said that they’d continue to have their embassy open “at a location at the airport.”
“To state the obvious here: an embassy does not belong in an airport because it’s not a f-cking Wolfgang Puck restaurant,” exclaimed Oliver. “And the fact is, America has now joined a long line of countries that came to Afghanistan to serve their own interests, only to leave defeated.”
The comic then pulled back to examine why we went to Afghanistan in the first place, addressing Biden’s curious origin story: “We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals: get those who attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001, and make sure al-Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again… our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-building.”
“Oh, OK then!” quipped Oliver. “That’s a little true, but also a lot not. Because, yes, the primary reason for initially invading Afghanistan was 9/11, and the fact that the Taliban had been giving safe haven to bin Laden. But very quickly, that mission became dressed up in the language of nation-building and human rights.” Even Biden himself said back then that “the alternative to nation-building is chaos.”
“The truth is, between a post-9/11 desire for vengeance and the Bush administration framing intervention as a crusade for human rights, they built a near-universal political consensus,” he continued. “Only one member of Congress, Representative Barbara Lee, voted against the authorization of military force.”
In addition to the muddled rationale for going into Afghanistan, Oliver pointed out how the U.S. paid off warlords and drug traffickers in the country, which bred distrust, and how the government we helped install quickly transformed into a kleptocracy. There’s also the extraordinary amount of money the U.S. spent on military contractors—including purchasing helicopters and planes for the Afghan military even though they had barely anyone to fly them.
As for the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan, that was set into motion in Feb. 2020 when the Trump administration—in the form of then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—struck a deal with the Taliban for a total withdrawal of the U.S. by May 2021, in exchange for the Taliban promising to not become a haven for terrorists and entering into negotiations with the Afghan government. However, as Oliver pointed out, that deal “excluded the Afghan government.” And right after they signed Trump’s deal, they carried out “at least 76 attacks across 24 Afghan provinces,” reported The New York Times.
“So, here we are: 20 years of war and destruction, tens of thousands of Afghans killed, many more traumatized, and the overall sense that you have at this point is a deep betrayal—betrayal of the promises that were made to the Afghan people, and betrayal of the U.S. service members asked to execute those self-serving promises, and are now left to ask themselves: What did I just do? What was this all for?”
Because of the chaos we left in our wake, Oliver argued that’s on the U.S. to help resolve this “massive humanitarian crisis,” because we “have a clear obligation to take in Afghans who are now vulnerable—and not just those who worked with U.S. troops.”
Of course, the xenophobic conservative commentators over at Fox News are already pushing back against the U.S. taking in Afghan refugees, with Tucker Carlson saying, “so first we invade, then we’re invaded,” and Laura Ingraham offering, “The lesson of this 20-year war cannot be that every time we turn a country upside down or make huge mistakes, our immigration laws, our refugee laws no longer apply.”
“Okay, first: f-ck off, you tag-team racial-panic goblins. Second, the notion of ‘every time we turn a country upside down’ is an incredible thing to just blow past. Maybe that’s the lesson here, Laura. Maybe don’t turn countries upside down in the first place!”
“As for ‘our refugee laws no longer apply,’ we are a big part of why those people are refugees. Helping them out is a charity. It’s doing the bare minimum. Refusing to help a neighbor whose home just burned down is shitty; doing it when you helped start the fire is f-cking monstrous.”
Oliver left his final criticisms for President Joe Biden, saying, “Biden’s failure to plan here is astonishing,” before pointing out his “continued indifference to the lives of anyone who’s not American” is callous since, “If Biden wants to argue for isolationism going forward he is welcome to do that, but what he can’t do is use that as a justification to dismiss the fates of people in a country we have already disastrously intervened, because we have a non-zero duty at this point to do everything we can to help them, and that means getting as many people out as we can.”
He ended by calling the Afghanistan withdrawal “a stain on Biden’s legacy” and stating, “The only question is: How big does he want that stain to be? And that is really up to him.”
