We know Americans have wanted out of Afghanistan for awhile. And now we’re getting an early look into how they feel about the way President Biden did it.
The numbers aren’t good for Biden. A huge majority of Americans say his withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan has gone very or somewhat badly, according to a new CBS News poll.
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Biden has his work cut out for him to manage several crises, from the coronavirus raging again, to a Taliban-run Afghanistan, to rising consumer costs, to surging Republican attacks trying to take advantage of all this ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. At stake is nothing short of his legislative agenda. A bipartisan infrastructure bill and a partisan spending bill to dramatically expand government benefits hang in the balance in Congress.
Biden may have less and less leverage to advocate for them. Two surveys this weekend, from NBC and CBS, find his approval rating falling precipitously over the past few months.
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An anatomy of Biden’s defense on Afghanistan
 Afghan refugees arrive at a processing center in Chantilly, Va., on Monday. (Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images) |
Biden has been speaking up more about his decision to leave Afghanistan. Here are three refrains he and his team use frequently.
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This decision had to be made: You’ve heard Biden say that he is the fourth president to preside over this war; he won’t pass it on to a fifth. A new argument in this vein is that getting out of Afghanistan was necessary for America’s long-term national security interests. Biden has argued that the war in Afghanistan is a drain on America’s resources to battle a rising China and Russia.
But: This misses the point of why Biden is under fire right now. Most Americans agree with him the war needed to end. How does Biden answer for planning to leave Afghanistan but then getting caught by surprise with a Taliban takeover?
Chaos is part of the cost of ending the war: “The evacuation of thousands of people from Kabul is going to be hard and painful no matter when it started and when we began,” Biden said Sunday. “It would have been true if we had started a month ago or a month from now. There is no way to evacuate this many people without pain and loss, of heartbreaking images you see on television.”
But: We’ll never know if that’s true, because America didn’t start evacuating people a month ago, like humanitarian workers pressured the Biden administration to consider doing.
They’re getting people out now: Biden and his team talk relentlessly about how they are evacuating thousands of Americans and Afghan allies every day. “Altogether, we lifted approximately 11,000 people out of Kabul in less than 36 hours,” he said Sunday. “It’s an incredible operation.”
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Again, none of this addresses concerns by Republicans and Democrats about why Biden waited too long to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies. The president has yet to fully address that.