- The video discusses the end of America's war in Afghanistan and the chaotic situation unfolding at Kabul's airport.
- It highlights the overcrowding of one American transport plane and shares footage of people clinging to the wheels of a plane and falling to their deaths.
- It questions the effectiveness of the US government's planning and decision-making, pointing out the contradictory statements made by officials.
- The video examines the reasons for America's involvement in Afghanistan, including the initial goal of capturing those responsible for the 9/11 attacks and preventing Afghanistan from being used as a base for future attacks.
- It criticizes the US government's focus on nation-building and human rights, arguing that the intervention ultimately led to a corrupt government and civilian casualties.
- The video also discusses the lack of clarity and coherence in the US mission in Afghanistan, as revealed by internal documents and interviews with military and diplomatic officials.
- It highlights the wasteful spending on military contractors and projects that had no long-term sustainability.
- The summary concludes by emphasizing the scale of the mess left behind in Afghanistan and the need to understand the consequences of America's involvement in the country.

- The head of SIGAR identifies the purchase of helicopters and airplanes for the Afghan air wing as a major waste of money.
- The Afghan government is heavily reliant on foreign grants, and as the Taliban takes over, the economy is at risk of collapsing.
- The gains made in Afghanistan, particularly for women, are now in jeopardy.
- The U.S. exit from Afghanistan was set in motion in 2020, following a deal with the Taliban.
- The Taliban has carried out numerous attacks and has ties to Al-Qaeda.
- The Taliban now possesses a significant amount of weaponry left behind by Afghan forces.
- There is a humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, and there is an obligation to help vulnerable Afghans.
- Some conservative commentators are opposing accepting Afghan refugees.
- Biden's failure to plan and indifference to the lives of non-Americans is criticized.
- Biden has expressed a desire to withdraw troops from Afghanistan regardless of the consequences.

- The author criticizes Biden's reference to Nixon and Kissinger as role models for handling the situation in Afghanistan.
- Biden argues that he bears no responsibility for the outcome in Afghanistan and prioritizes America's national self-interest.
- The author argues that Biden should not dismiss the fate of people affected by US intervention and emphasizes the duty to help them.
- Securing a perimeter at the Kabul airport is crucial to ensure safe evacuation, especially for at-risk Afghans without visas.
- Granting categorical humanitarian parole can expedite the process of bringing at-risk Afghans to the US.
- The chaos in Afghanistan is seen as a stain on Biden's legacy, and the author calls for political action to address the situation.
- The author suggests that the US needs to reevaluate its approach to intervention and acknowledges the limitations of imposing its will on other countries.
- The author emphasizes the need to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan and rejects the idea that America bears no responsibility.

The video discusses the chaotic situation at Kabul's airport as the US war in Afghanistan comes to an end. It questions the effectiveness of the US government's planning and decision-making, criticizes the focus on nation-building, and highlights the wasteful spending on military contractors. The summary emphasizes the consequences of America's involvement in Afghanistan, including the risk of economic collapse and the jeopardization of gains made for women. It criticizes Biden's handling of the situation and calls for political action to address the humanitarian crisis. The author suggests reevaluating the US approach to intervention and emphasizes America's responsibility to help those affected.

John Oliver discusses the end of America’s war with Afghanistan, and the humanitarian crisis being left behind.

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-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ Let's dive straight in with our main story tonight, 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.

Afghans are thronging to Kabul's airport.

We now know that at least 1 of the American transports took off with a payload far in excess of the maximum recommended.

You never ever want to be on a plane that is managing to actively impress air traffic control.

Although I will say that is the exact reaction I want every time I do a single push-up.

Holy cow, I mean, good job getting off the ground.

No 1 could have expected anything more from you.

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 just 10 days ago, the U.S.

Was desperately trying to negotiate with the Taliban, asking it 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.

Although the Secretary of State pushed back on the idea that the embassy was closed at all.

So if no American is in the embassy, we've essentially closed the embassy.

We're gonna have our core diplomatic presence.

And in effect, an embassy at a location at the airport.

Because, we'll have, in effect, an embassy is already pretty alarming, then you finish it off with, at a location at the airport.

Perhaps the darkest qualifier in the English language.

Because to state the obvious here, an embassy does not belong in an airport because it's not a fucking Wolfgang Puck restaurant.

And the fact is, America has now joined a long line of countries who came to Afghanistan to serve their own interests, only to leave defeated.

It's a pattern so universally known, it was literally a plot point in Rambo III.

Alexander the Great tried to conquer this country, then Genghis Khan, then the British, now Russia.

Ancient enemy, make prayer about these people.

It says, May God deliver us from the venom of the cobra, teeth of the tiger, and the vengeance of the Afghan.

Although, it feels like old Rambo could have used a few more follow-ups there.

Sure, but also that our political system has long been defined by other countries' imperial self-interest.

I'm guessing we'll be seeing you guys in roughly 15 years.

And look, clearly, we don't have time to recap the last 20 years of America's involvement in Afghanistan, much less reckon with all the long-term consequences.

But we thought tonight, in the wake of the chaos this week, it'd be worth trying to answer a few basic questions.

Why were we in Afghanistan in the first place?

Because on Monday, Biden offered this origin story.

We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals.

Get those who attacked us on September 11th, 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.

If our mission was never nation-building, then I guess, Not mission, not accomplished.

But the thing is, 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.

Bush said, rooting out the Taliban was important, but building a school is equally important.

And Biden himself said back then, the alternative to nation-building is chaos.

And there was lots of focus at the time on atrocities the Taliban had committed during their 5 years of repressive rule.

The subjugation of women, the executions in the soccer stadium, the destruction of the famous Buddhas of Bamiyan, all of which were terrible, but which had been equally terrible before September 11th, and we hadn't done much about it.

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.

Only 1 member of Congress, Representative Barbara Lee, voted against the authorization of military force.

Other Democrats jumped to co-sign the human rights argument, like Representative Carolyn Maloney, who delivered a speech on the floor of the House about the need to combat Taliban repressions, featuring a striking visual aid.

I salute the Bush administration for balancing war with compassion, for dropping food as well as bombs.

Even in war, we are showing a regard for human life and human rights that the Taliban will never know.

Okay, first, it doesn't get much more the month after 9-11 than a white Democrat in a Fuck You burka saluting the Bush administration's commitment to human rights.

And the problem there is, you could be revealing the solution for world hunger, but if you are a white lady who threw on a burka for the drama, you are fundamentally distracting from your point.

As for, we dropped food as well as bombs, those 2 do not cancel each other out.

Over 71,000 Afghan and Pakistani civilians are estimated to have died as a direct result of this war, with many more injured or displaced.

As for our program of drone strikes, they didn't just kill civilians, they traumatized an entire generation.

The villagers call them planes without men.

Sherzaman says his nine-year-old son, Suleyman, was killed by a drone 3 months ago, along with the fathers of all of these children.

I can't walk outside my home because I'm scared.

So if Carolyn Maloney wants to illustrate all the major threats Afghan society's faced in recent years, she may want to deliver her next speech dressed like a fucking drone.

And those strikes are just 1 part of the answer to our second question, which is, what exactly did we do in Afghanistan?

Came in with big plans, promising to set up a modern, centralized democracy.

And yet, instead of engaging with and understanding the country's complex local political powers, We adopted a policy of paying off and co-opting local warlords and drug traffickers, which eroded trust quickly between the Afghan people and the blatantly corrupt government that we helped fuel.

By 2006, in the words of 1 retired colonel, the government had self-organized into a kleptocracy under which people in power could plunder the economy without restraint.

And yet, successive administrations kept giving us rosy assessments like this.

The Taliban have been driven from power, Al-Qaeda has been driven from its camps, and Afghanistan is free.

That's why I say we have made remarkable progress.

We make a lot of progress in Afghanistan.

And with time, we'll have it spinning like a top.

We did leave Afghanistan spinning like a top.

You know, those things that famously spin forever and never collapse.

The fact is, things obviously weren't going as well as all 3 of those men publicly claimed, as we now know, not least, thanks to this revelation 2 years ago.

According to more than 2,000 pages of documents obtained by The Washington Post.

Military commanders, diplomats and aid workers privately and in blunt terms describe an unclear mission, a failed strategy and efforts to sway public opinion.

Among the revelations, retired General Douglas Lute, the Afghan war czar under Presidents Bush and Obama, saying in 2015, what are we trying to do here?

We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.

That sounds less like something you'd expect to hear from a general, and more like the internal monologue for Sir Ian McKellen in this photo from the set of Cats.

Has anyone got a plan for what this is going to look like in the end?

I have the foggiest notion of what we're undertaking.

Those interviews were collected by SIGAR, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a government office tasked with producing honest reports about how things were really going there.

Government's goals were often operationally impractical or conceptually incoherent.

SIGAR's mandate was to promote efficiency and prevent waste, fraud, and abuse.

And I know, focusing on wasteful spending may seem like the absolute least of the issues here.

But sometimes, knowing exactly where the money was spent helps you understand the scale of the mess we've left behind.

Because so much money went to military contractors to set up projects with no plan for how they'd survive after we were gone.

Here's the head of SIGAR identifying 1 expenditure in particular.

I think the worst case so far of just stupid waste has been the purchase of the helicopters and the airplanes for the Afghan air wing.

It's clearly risking that those planes and those helicopters are just going to end up on the tarmac, rusting.

They can't even use the planes they currently have.

Over 70 percent of the maintenance is being done by U.S.

They don't have the pilots, they don't have the ground crews, they don't have the workers to repair them.

That clip is from 7 years ago, but it's not like since then we've fixed the underlying problem.

Last month, defense officials were maintaining that aircraft could still be used after we were gone because Afghans could simply service them with U.S.

Contractors looking over their shoulders via Zoom or coaching them over the phone.

Which is so close to nothing, I'm honestly surprised the U.S.

Didn't just buy every Afghan technician a MasterClass subscription and tell them that Anna Wintour's course would supercharge their creativity.

And that is just emblematic of our behavior in Afghanistan.

We came in, built something on the American model, almost wholly dependent on American support, and put next to no effort into ensuring that it was sustainable after we left.

Foreign grants financed around 75 percent of its public spending.

Meaning that, as the Taliban takes over, that money presumably dries up, and the economy is now poised to collapse.

And It's not just the economy that's in danger here.

There were real, meaningful gains, particularly for women who had suffered terribly under the previous Taliban regime.

Millions of girls were allowed to attend school for the first time, and women joined the military, the police, and held political office.

But those achievements are in real jeopardy now.

And some who led the way, like Mahbuba Sarraj, an Afghan women's activist, are acutely aware of that fact.

I'm going to say to the whole world, shame on you.

Are we being just the pawns in your hands?

They just made decisions with their gut feelings or whatever, all of these men of the world that they are in power, and they are destroying what's something that we worked so hard for.

What is happening in Afghanistan today is going to put this country 200 years back.

The people of Afghanistan have been treated like pawns.

While there were gains, the initial impulse that led to them was purely U.S.

And for 20 years, for multiple reasons, the U.S.

And various Afghan governments did not secure those gains, and even though this week has brought incredible scenes of Afghan women leading protests against the incoming Taliban regime, odds are, much of that progress is now set to be obliterated.

It is very hard to make a good case for that, especially given that the Taliban have been strengthening in recent years and have made it clear that they were going to escalate violence unless we left, which most people agree we had to do.

The problem is, though, just as we went in, focused entirely on U.S.

Interests, we are leaving the exact same way.

And that brings us to what we're doing right now.

Because this exit was set in motion in February of 2020, when the Trump administration struck a deal with the Taliban for a total U.S.

In exchange, the Taliban agreed not to let Afghanistan become a haven for terrorists, and to start peace talks with the Afghan government.

Although notably, that deal excluded the Afghan government, making this line from Mike Pompeo a little hard to take.

When it comes down to it, the future of Afghanistan is for Afghans to determine.

The U.S.-Taliban deal creates the conditions for Afghans to do just that.

Well, hold on there, Mikey, because you never want 2 people in a room determining your future without you, especially if 1 of them is the fucking Taliban.

How does Pompeo expect the Afghan people to react to that?

Today is the first day of what someone else determines the rest of your life will be.

Now, Biden pushed our exit date back slightly to August 31st, but he basically followed through with the Trump administration's deal.

And while the Taliban largely stuck by their promise not to attack U.S.

Personnel, almost immediately after signing that deal, they carried out at least 76 attacks across 24 Afghan provinces, and have since pursued assassination campaigns of government officials, journalists, and civil society actors, and just this May, beheaded an Afghan interpreter for the U.S.

And yet, all the while, they've made a big show of presenting themselves in a more modern, flattering light.

This was a smarter, more media-savvy Taliban senior leaders claiming they want to form an inclusive Islamic government.

The group is establishing a civilian casualty prevention and complaints commission, tweeting out WhatsApp phone numbers for Afghans to send in complaints.

And set aside the fact that Taliban Complaints Department sounds like a sketch Elon Musk pitched to SNL, I'm not sure it's gonna be all that effective.

It's the equivalent of instituting a complaint box in Scott Rudin's office.

The problem with the behavior there isn't lack of awareness.

A significantly changed Taliban just doesn't seem likely here.

Their ties to Al-Qaeda only appear to be deepening, and they're now even better armed.

The Afghan forces fell so quickly, they left behind brand new boxes of guns and grenade launchers, which Taliban fighters have been filming themselves opening in the world's grimmest unboxing videos.

What happens to the billions of dollars worth of weaponry that the U.S.

We don't have a complete picture, obviously, of where every article, of defense materials has gone, but certainly a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban.

And, obviously, we don't have a sense that they are going to readily hand it over to us at the airport.

Yeah, I think that's a pretty safe assumption.

But hey, we can always text the Taliban complaint department and see what happens.

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 of 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 asking themselves, what did I just do?

The military sent out an email to 9000000 veterans this week, offering a list of mental health resources with notes like, if you're having thoughts of suicide, call this number.

This is a grim situation, and there are immediate decisions that need to be made that have life or death consequences for Afghans who put their trust in us, like this activist.

Fatima, that's not her real name, and her children have gone into hiding after death threats from the Taliban for her work in empowering other women.

new and better Afghanistan, But now she's viewed as a spy and enemy collaborator.

It's not only that I am in danger, now my kids are in danger.

We bear responsibility for the position that she's in.

We said we'd protect people who did courageous things that pissed off the Taliban, like advocate for human rights, even if it wound up putting a target on their back.

And now it feels like we're walking away going, Oh, cool target, how'd you get that?

You know what, don't answer, we're fucking leaving.

And again, I am not advocating for staying at all.

What I am saying is, we're in the midst of a massive humanitarian crisis, and we have a clear obligation to take in Afghans who are now vulnerable, and not just those that worked with U.S.

Troops, but those like Fatima and her children whose lives are now at grave risk.

Although, some conservative commentators are already trying to get way out ahead of that.

If history is any guide, and it's always a guide, we will see many refugees from Afghanistan resettle in our country in coming months, probably in your neighborhood.

And over the next decade, that number may swell to the millions.

So first we invade, and then we're invaded.

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, fuck 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 don't keep turning 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 now isn't charity, it's doing the bare minimum.

Refusing to help a neighbor whose home just burned down is shitty.

Doing it when you help start the fire is fucking monstrous.

And the thing is, they are not the only ones who've been blind about the fate of the Afghans.

Biden's failure to plan here is astonishing.

But his continued indifference to the lives of anyone who's not American isn't really surprising.

According to the late diplomat Richard Holbrooke's diary, in 2010, the 2 men had a conversation, and Biden told him the U.S.

Had to withdraw every troop from Afghanistan regardless of the consequences for women or anyone else.

And when Holbrooke asked him about American obligations to those who'd be in danger if we left, Biden mentioned the U.S.

Withdrawal from Southeast Asia in 1973, saying, "'Fuck that.

Nixon and Kissinger got away with it." And may I just say, Joe, A-plus choice of historical role models there.

When you're rolling with Dick and the Kiss, you know you're rolling on the right side of history.

And last February, Biden doubled down on that argument.

Don't you bear some responsibility for the outcome if the Taliban ends up back in control and women end up losing the rights?

The responsibility I have is to protect America's national self-interest and not put our women and men in harm's way to try to solve every single problem in the world by use of force.

Okay, real quick, you don't have to make a 0 with your fingers to indicate you mean 0.

You're an adult man, not a child ensemble member of Broadway's Matilda.

Though I will say, 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 whose country we've 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.

And advocates for refugees say that the first thing to do here is secure a perimeter at the Kabul airport, making sure that people have a safe way to get there and to get inside, because that has been total chaos this week, to the point that many of the departing flights have left with empty seats.

And the fact that there are people with visas unable to get onto the planes is bad enough, but there are many more at-risk Afghans who are without visas or who are still stuck in the process.

And we should be getting them to the U.S.

As quickly as possible so they can then safely finish their paperwork here.

And that can be achieved by granting them categorical humanitarian parole.

And to the extent that any hesitation about doing this is due to fear of political blowback thanks to idiots like these, call your representatives and tell them that you care about this.

Because if they think that you don't, it is not going to happen.

Look, the chaos this week is already a stain on Biden's legacy.

The only question is, how big does he want that stain to be?

But more broadly, we as a country need to take a hard look at what we've done in Afghanistan, which is likely to be destabilized for decades to come.

No amount of brute force or perseverance is gonna clear up the clusterfuck that we helped fuck into existence.

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