President Joe Biden is staking Democrats’ political fortunes on voters caring more about the fact that U.S. troops have left Afghanistan than how they departed: a picture of chaos at the Kabul airport and some Americans left behind.
Biden devoted much of his speech at the White House on Tuesday to the popular decision to withdraw.
“We were left with a simple decision: Either follow through on the commitment made by the last administration and leave Afghanistan or say we weren’t leaving and commit another tens of thousands more troops going back to war,” he said. “That was the choice, the real choice, between leaving or escalating.”
“I was not going to extend this forever war, and I was not extending a forever exit,” Biden added. “The decision to end the military airlift operations at Kabul airport was based on the unanimous recommendation of my civilian and military advisers — the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and all the service chiefs, and the commanders in the field.”
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This emphasis reflects public sentiment. A Pew Research Center poll found that 54% thought withdrawing troops was the right decision compared to 42% who believed it was wrong. The majorities were larger in most recent polling before Biden’s chaotic exit, especially among Republicans, but that is still a solid pro-withdrawal majority. Additionally, 69% think the United States was failing to achieve its goals in Afghanistan compared to 27% who felt it was succeeding.
While Biden’s general policy views on getting out of Afghanistan polled well, adults surveyed by Pew gave him low marks for his execution. Only 6% thought the Biden administration did an “excellent” job handling the situation compared to 21% who rated it “good.” A plurality of 42% said the administration’s performance in Afghanistan was “poor,” and another 29% labeled it “fair.”
That is a 71% supermajority who thinks the Biden team, elected based on governing experience and competence, did only a “fair” or “poor” job leaving Afghanistan.
Biden defended the way his plan was executed in his speech on Tuesday.
“We completed one of the biggest airlifts in history, with more than 120,000 people evacuated to safety,” he said. “That number is more than double what most experts thought were possible. No nation — no nation has ever done anything like it in all of history.”
Hours after Biden said “90% of Americans in Afghanistan who wanted to leave were able to leave,” conceding that some were left behind, the White House released an updated transcript of his remarks correcting the figure to 98%.
But more than a dozen U.S. service members and several Afghans were killed when ISIS-K attacked the airport in Kabul during the evacuations. The picture for Afghan nationals who worked alongside Americans during the decadeslong war effort is also murky.
This has left Biden — over a year away from the pivotal midterm elections, in which Democrats are defending narrow congressional majorities, and even further out from the 2024 presidential race — with one hope on Afghanistan: that the disturbing images from Kabul will be forgotten over time, and he will be rewarded for fulfilling a campaign promise on the war.
The initial numbers haven’t been encouraging. Since Kabul fell, Biden’s job approval rating has gone underwater in the RealClearPolitics polling average. There has been some variation in individual polls, with USA Today/Suffolk University and Rasmussen showing a 55% and 54% disapproval rating, respectively. Even favorable polls from Reuters/Ipsos and Economist/YouGov show a split, with his approval under 50%.
“That’s a lifetime away in politics,” a Democratic strategist said of the midterm elections.
The previous two Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, withstood poor midterm election campaigns, in which their party lost congressional seats but went on to win reelection themselves.
One question is whether this episode will change public perceptions of Biden’s skills as commander in chief. He defeated former President Donald Trump, whose deal with the Taliban Biden mostly accepted as a reason to depart Afghanistan, in part because of his experience. Biden served eight years as vice president and 36 years as a senator, chairing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the beginning of the war on terror.
Another is whether Afghanistan becomes a base of terrorist operations that can threaten the U.S., which led to the war in the first place.
“We have tried to manage this from the air before,” said a counterterrorism expert. “We can overlearn the lessons.”
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Biden will want to quickly turn the page from Afghanistan to domestic priorities, such as the bipartisan infrastructure package and the accompanying liberal reconciliation bill. Nonetheless, he took a victory lap.
“When I was running for president, I made a commitment to the American people that I would end this war,” he said. “And today, I’ve honored that commitment. It was time to be honest with the American people again. We no longer had a clear purpose in an open-ended mission in Afghanistan.”
