There’s No ‘America First’ Way to Evacuate Afghanistan

As the war in Afghanistan sputters to a close, what does America owe to the Afghan interpreters and others who assisted our military during our two-decade deployment? For months, lawmakers’ bipartisan consensus was that the very least we could do was offer shelter in the United States to these people whose past assistance to us would surely endanger their lives under a Taliban regime.

But that was before this week, when the collapse of Afghanistan dominated the news cycle and professional partisan takesters started limbering up their reliable old pitchfork lines about letting foreigners into America.

“Is it really our responsibility to welcome thousands of potentially unvetted refugees from Afghanistan?” Fox News’s Laura Ingraham said on her show on Tuesday. “All day we heard phrases like ‘we promised them.’ Well, who did? Did you?”

It was a remarkably callous thing to say about people who spent years working hand-in-glove with and providing invaluable assistance to American military personnel—which perhaps explains why we’ve seen a second, more subtle version of the same argument cropping up over the last couple days.