 | | President George W. Bush on Oct. 7, 2001, announcing that the United States had begun military actions in Afghanistan.Associated Press |
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 | | President Biden on Wednesday, announcing the withdrawal of the remainder of U.S. troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, 2021.Andrew Harnik/Epa |
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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. |
That differs significantly from the country's feelings about the war in Iraq: By 2007, 62 percent of Americans said sending troops there had been a mistake, according to Gallup. That number has not fallen below 50 percent since then. Similarly, by the time American troops began heading home from Vietnam in the mid-1970s, six in 10 Americans were telling Gallup pollsters that the war there hadn't been worthwhile. |
No such public outcry emerged around Afghanistan. Shortly after President Donald Trump announced his intention in 2019 to bring home most of the American troops stationed there, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that just one in three Americans thought the United States "should have a rapid and orderly withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan." Fifty-eight percent opposed it. |
Still, the issue has a relatively low salience for voters, as the number of U.S. casualties has remained low and the war has garnered scant attention in the American press — even as the political instability in Afghanistan has grown only more severe in recent years. |
According to an Associated Press/NORC poll last year, just 12 percent of Americans said they were closely following news related to the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. |
"You would need an electron microscope to detect the effect of Afghanistan on any congressional race in the last decade," Biddle said, referring to the American political picture. "It's been invisible." |
From a political standpoint, it remains true that Democrats are far more dovish on Afghanistan than Republicans — despite Trump's anti-intervention stance — indicating that Biden and his allies are unlikely to suffer consequences from within their own party for his decision, and may even reap some rewards. In 2019, Gallup found that 53 percent of Democrats said sending troops into the country had been an error, while just 25 percent of Republicans agreed. For independents, it was an even split: 48 percent thought it was a mistake, and 47 percent disagreed. |
Gallup and others have also conducted polling in Afghanistan in recent years. And what they've exposed about the lives and views of Afghan citizens has not been encouraging. |
In 2019, Gallup found that Afghans' expectations for the next few years of their lives had grown dismal: On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 representing "the worst possible life" ahead and 10 representing the best, the average rating was approximately 2.5. |
A separate survey last year by the Asia Foundation showed that Afghans remained mostly hopeful about the prospect of achieving peace within the next two years — but among the roughly one-third of Afghans who felt peace would not be achievable, the most commonly cited reason was foreign interference. |
I fought in Afghanistan. I still wonder, was it worth it? |
| Kudo is a former Marine captain who served in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. He is working on a novel about the Afghanistan war. |
When President Biden announced on Wednesday that the United States would withdraw all its troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, 2021, he appeared to be finally bringing this "forever war" to an end. Although I have waited for this moment for a decade, it is impossible to feel relief. The Sept. 11 attacks took place during my senior year of college, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that followed consumed the entirety of my adult life. Although history books may mark this as the end of the Afghanistan war, it will never be over for many of my generation who fought. |
Sometimes there are moments, no more than the span of a breath, when the smell of it returns and once again I'm stepping off the helicopter ramp into the valley. Covered in the ashen dust of the rotor wash, I take in for the first time the blend of wood fires burning from inside lattice-shaped mud compounds, flooded fields of poppies and corn, the sweat of the unwashed and the wet naps that failed to mask it, chicken and sheep and the occasional cow, the burn pit where trash and plastic smoldered through the day, curries slick with oil eaten by hand on carpeted dirt floors, and fresh bodies buried shallow, like I.E.D.s, in the bitter earth. |
It's sweet and earthy, familiar to the farm boys in the platoon who knew that blend of animal and human musk but alien to those of us used only to the city or the lush Southern woods we patrolled during training. Later, at the big bases far from the action, surrounded by gyms and chow halls and the expeditionary office park where the flag and field grade officers did their work, it was replaced by a cologne of machinery and order. Of common parts installed by low-bid contractors and the ocher windblown sand of the vast deserts where those behemoth bases were always located. Relatively safe after the long months at the frontier but dull and lifeless. |
Then it's replaced by the sweet, artificial scents of home after the long plane ride back. Suddenly I'm on a cold American street littered with leaves. A couple passes by holding hands, a bottle of wine in a tote bag, dressed for a party, unaware of the veneer that preserves their carelessness. |
I remain distant from them, trapped between past and present, in the same space you sometimes see in the eyes of the old-timers marching in Veterans Day parades with their folded caps covered in retired unit patches, wearing surplus uniforms they can't seem to take off. It's the space between their staring eyes and the cheering crowd where those of us who return from war abide. |
My war ended in 2011, when I came home from Afghanistan eager to resume my life. I was in peak physical shape, had a college degree, had a half-year of saved paychecks and would receive an honorable discharge from the Marine Corps in a few months. I was free to do whatever I wanted, but I couldn't bring myself to do anything. |
Initially I attributed it to jet lag, then to a need for well-deserved rest, but eventually there was no excuse. I returned to my friends and family, hoping I would feel different. I did not. |
"Relax. You earned it," they said. "There's plenty of time to figure out what's next." But figuring out the future felt like abandoning the past. It had been just a month since my last combat patrol, but I know now that years don't make a difference. |
The Improvement Association, Chapter 2: 'Where is your choice?' |
In the second episode of The Times's new podcast about election fraud allegations in North Carolina, the reporter Zoe Chace talks to people in the state who believe the Bladen Improvement PAC has been cheating for years. |
She tries to get beyond the rumors and into specifics; in the process, she comes face to face with the intense suspicion and scrutiny leveled against the organization. You can listen here. |
Sway: CNN's post-Trump slump |
And on today's episode of "Sway," the CNN host Don Lemon joins Kara Swisher to discuss the future of cable news, the urgency of conversations about race and whether his television network is a boys' club. Tune in here. |
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