CNN’s Lemon on Americans in Afghanistan: ‘We Don’t Know if We Left Them Behind Yet’

CNN anchor Don Lemon on Wednesday during the handoff from fellow anchor Chris Cuomo said we did not yet know if we left “behind” Americans and Afghan allies stranded in Afghanistan.

Lemon said, “Listen, I understand the emotion around it but let’s be a little bit unemotional here, if we can. Wars are terrible. This is our longest war. I think in any situation, whether you agree with the exit or not, you’re not going to get all of the people out that you want in the time period. I think that is asking for something that’s not — you can’t accomplish that. It’s just not going to happen in any situation.”

He continued, “I think people should stop beating up on the administration so much because no matter how it ended, everyone wasn’t going to be happy with the way it ended. So, if there’s any silver lining in this, it’s going to be what happens going forward. You can’t change the past. You can’t bring those lives back as awful as that is. And so, you know, I think the administration is getting beaten up on this a little bit too much because there’s a lot of blame to go around from four different presidents and who actually didn’t have the guts to get us out of Afghanistan because they were afraid of this moment and what an exit might look like.”

Lemon added, “I do believe that there’s going to have to be accountability. We’re going to have to find out exactly what happened and what went wrong… It’s TBD, to be determined. We’re still seeing what’s happening. You can’t get them out there- you can’t get them all out in five minutes. You can’t get them all out yesterday. So what happens going forward when we continue with this effort to get them out, and we start getting them out, as many out as possible. Then I think we should stop all, you know, running around like, ‘Oh my gosh! I can’t believe we left so many people behind. We don’t know if we left them behind yet. We don’t know yet.”

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