For the American public, there was never any great outcry for withdrawing, polling suggests.
When President Biden announced yesterday that he would pull American troops out of Afghanistan by Sept.11, he was following through on a pledge that he’d made on the campaign trail — and perhaps just as important, he was making good on a promise to himself. Biden has long hoped to disentangle the United States from Afghanistan, where it has remained mired for the past two decades. Speaking from the White House, Biden said that after conversations with American and Afghan officials: “I concluded that it’s time to end America’s longest war. It’s time for American troops to come home.” But for the American public, there was never any great outcry for withdrawing, polling suggests. “There are no candlelit marches on the Pentagon about Afghanistan; nobody’s throwing bags of fake blood on military officers,” Stephen Biddle, a professor of international affairs at Columbia University and a Council on Foreign Relations fellow studying Afghanistan policy, said in an interview. So it’s possible to think of Biden’s decision not as a response to public demand, but as a move that he believed was necessary — and relatively uncostly in the realm of public opinion. When the United States went to war there in 2001, the American public agreed almost unanimously with President George W. Bush’s decision. That November, still shaken by the attacks of Sept.11, nine in 10 Americans said they thought sending troops into Afghanistan was the right thing to do, according to a Gallup poll. Over the past 20 years, the public’s views on the United States’ presence in Afghanistan have shifted, but they haven’t totally flipped. The percentage of Americans saying it was a mistake to send troops to Afghanistan ticked up steadily in the 2000s, but plateaued in the mid-40s, where it remained in 2019, the last time Gallup asked the question.
