Stephen Colbert on Afghanistan exit: ‘The right thing to do, but it’s heartbreaking’
“Let’s rip the Band-Aid off: the Taliban have taken over Afghanistan,” said Stephen Colbert on Monday’s Late Show, as the Afghan government, the country’s armed forces and its capital, Kabul, collapsed just days after the US began the withdrawal of troops. “The US has been there for 20 years, we spent $2tn, we trained a 300,000-man-strong Afghan army – and the Taliban took it over in 10 days,” Colbert recapped.
“It’s hard to argue that the White House didn’t shank the withdrawal,” he continued. The rapid fall of Afghanistan’s western-backed democratic government and chaos in Kabul – chaos at Hamid Karzai airport caused the deaths of at least seven people – swiftly disproved the Biden administration’s calculations of a smooth withdrawal. A Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was “not inevitable” and “highly unlikely”, Biden said on 8 July.
“That is the most inaccurate prediction from a president since Abe Lincoln said ‘see you after the play!’” Colbert joked.
But Colbert added that criticism from Republicans over Biden’s handling of the situation didn’t hold water; Trump’s policies as president – reducing US troops from 15,000 to 2,500, negotiating a ceasefire with the Taliban without the Afghan government, convincing the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners – “set the stage” for the “debacle”.
Trump figures blaming Biden for the mess is “like Andrew Lloyd Webber calling Cats a terrible movie,” he said. “You wrote a musical with no plot – how did you think this was gonna end?
“We’ve had troops there for 20 years – they fought, they sacrificed, their families sacrificed so that we wouldn’t have a terrorist attack in America planned in a foreign country,” he continued. “Why should our soldiers be fighting radicals in a civil war in Afghanistan? We’ve got our own on Capitol Hill.”
Like the initial invasion 20 years ago, the withdrawal of US troops is supported by the majority of Americans – as much as 70%. “Do you know how few things 70% of Americans agree on?” said Colbert. “I think it’s this and extra cheese, which also often ends badly and faster than you planned.
“So, in the end, you can make us accept that there was no good alternative, but you can’t make us feel good about it,” he concluded. “The only people who can feel good about this are the service members and their families who aren’t going to see soldiers sent into harm’s way for no reason that the commander-in-chief of either party can articulate.
“For the last 20 years, four separate administrations told the American
people to care about the plight of all the Afghan people, especially the women,” he added. “And we did care. And that’s not going to change. All that’s changed is that there’s nothing we can do about it now. So pulling out may be the right thing to do, but it’s heartbreaking. It’s humbling when the right thing feels so wrong.”
The disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and Taliban takeover marks the end to a “20-year, bipartisan foreign policy disaster that American officials of both parties bear responsibility and which they have repeatedly lied about,” said Seth Meyers on Late Night.
Meyers stressed the bipartisan, dismissing an attempt by Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state, to claim, on Fox News, that the Taliban takeover wouldn’t have happened under the Trump administration. “You think the Trump plan would’ve been more orderly than what’s happening now?” Meyers fumed. “You guys were the ones who wanted to withdraw by May. I have a hard time believing Trump would’ve done it in a more orderly way since nothing he ever did was orderly. He couldn’t even withdraw from an umbrella in an orderly fashion.
“Instead of armchair generals engaging in craven political point-scoring, what we need right now is everyone calling for the US to accept as many Afghan refugees as possible,” he continued, calling on the Biden administration to offer asylum to any Afghan refugees who wish to come to the US. “It’s the bare minimum we can do, and we should be doing it as fast as possible.
“The majority of Americans want the forever war in Afghanistan to end, it should’ve ended a long time ago. Ending it now is the only option,” he concluded. “But one thing we can and must do right now and is accept as many refugees, and grant as many Afghans asylum, as we possibly can, as quickly as we can.”