Biden's approval rating is falling.

 

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.

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.

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.

Kabul Chaos Simmers Down

Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman for nearly two decades, appears at a press conference in Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 17. (Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times)

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON 

A week after the Taliban took control of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, as the U.S. was withdrawing the forces that have been in the country since 2001, the initial chaos created by the Taliban’s rapid sweep across the country has simmered down into what is at least a temporary pattern.

We knew there was a good chance that the Taliban would regain control of the country when we left, although that was not a foregone conclusion. The former president, Donald Trump, recognized that the American people were tired of the ongoing war in Afghanistan, which was approaching its 20th year, and in February 2020, his administration negotiated with the Taliban to enable the U.S. to withdraw. In exchange for the release of 5000 Taliban fighters and the promise that the U.S. would withdraw within the next 14 months, the Taliban agreed not to attack U.S. soldiers.

Trump’s dislike of the war in Afghanistan reflected the unpopularity of the long engagement, which by 2020 was ill defined. The war had begun in 2001, after terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda attacked the United States on September 11 of that year. Taliban leaders in control of Afghanistan sheltered al-Qaeda, and after the attacks, the U.S. president, George W. Bush, demanded that Afghanistan hand over the terrorist leader believed to be behind the terrorist attack on the U.S: Osama bin Laden. In October, after Taliban leaders refused, the U.S. launched a bombing campaign.

That campaign was successful enough that in December 2001 the Taliban offered to surrender. But the U.S. rejected that surrender, determined by then to eradicate the extremist group and fill the vacuum of its collapse with a new, pro-American government. Al-Qaeda leader bin Laden escaped from Afghanistan to Pakistan, and the U.S. project in Afghanistan turned from an anti-terrorism mission into an effort to rebuild the Afghan government into a modern democracy.

By 2002 the Bush administration was articulating a new doctrine in foreign policy, arguing that the U.S. had a right to strike preemptively against countries that harbor terrorists. In 2003, under this doctrine, the U.S. launched a war on Iraq, which diverted money, troops, and attention from Afghanistan. The Taliban regrouped and began to regain the territory it had lost after the U.S. first began its bombing campaign in 2001.

By 2005, Bush administration officials privately worried the war in Afghanistan could not be won on its current terms, especially with the U.S. focused on Iraq. Then, when he took office in 2009, President Barack Obama turned his attention back to Afghanistan. He threw more troops into that country, bringing their numbers close to 100,000. In 2011, the U.S. military located bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and launched a raid on the compound where he was hiding, killing him. By 2014, Obama had drawn troops in Afghanistan down to about 11,000, and in December of that year, he announced that the mission of the war—weakening the Taliban and capturing bin Laden—had been accomplished, and thus the war was over. The troops would come home.

But, of course, they didn’t, leaving Trump to develop his own policy. But his administration’s approach to the chaos in that country was different than his predecessor’s. By negotiating with the Taliban and excluding the Afghan government the U.S. had been supporting, the Trump team essentially accepted that the Taliban were the most important party in Afghanistan. The agreement itself reflected the oddity of the negotiations. Each clause referring to the Taliban began: “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan which is not recognized by the United States as a state and is known as the Taliban will….”

It was immediately clear that the Taliban was not living up to its side of the bargain. Although it did stop attacking U.S. troops, It began to escalate violence in Afghanistan itself, assassinated political opponents, and maintained ties to al-Qaeda. Nonetheless, the Trump administration put pressure on the leaders of the Afghan government to release the 5000 Taliban prisoners, and they eventually did. Before Biden took office, Trump dropped the U.S. troop engagement in Afghanistan from about 13,000 to about 2500.

When he took office, Biden had to decide whether to follow Trump’s path or to push back on the Taliban on the grounds they were not honoring the agreement Trump’s people had hammered out. Biden himself wanted to get out of the war. At the same time, he recognized that fighting the Taliban again would mean throwing more troops back into Afghanistan, and that the U.S. would again begin to take casualties. He opted to get the troops out, but extended the deadline to September 11, 2021, the twentieth anniversary of the initial attack. (Former president Trump complained that the troops should come out faster.)

What Biden did not foresee was the speed with which the Taliban would retake control of the country. It swept over the regional capitals and then Kabul in about nine days in mid-August with barely a shot fired, and the head of the Afghan government fled the country, leaving it in chaos.

That speed left the U.S. flatfooted. Afghans who had been part of the government or who had helped the U.S. and its allies rushed to the airport to try to escape. In the pandemonium of that first day, up to seven people were killed; two people appear to have clung to a U.S. military plane as it took off, falling to their deaths.

And yet, the Taliban, so far, has promised amnesty for its former opponents and limited rights for women. It has its own problems, as the Afghan government has been supported for the previous 20 years by foreign money, including a large percentage from the U.S. Not only has that money dried up as foreign countries refuse to back the Taliban, but also Biden has put sanctions on Afghanistan and also on some Pakistanis suspected of funding the Taliban. At the same time it appears that no other major sponsor, like Russia or China, has stepped in to fill the vacuum left by U.S. money, leaving the Taliban fishing for whatever goodwill it can find.

Yesterday, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo flagged tweets showing that members of the Afghan government, including the brother of the president who fled, are in what appear from the photos posted on Twitter to be relaxed talks about forming a new government. Other factions in Afghanistan would like to stop this from happening, and today Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan warned that ISIS-K, another extremist group, is threatening to attack the airport to destabilize the Taliban.

Meanwhile, there are 10,000 people crowded into that airport, and U.S. evacuations continue. The Kabul airport is secure—for now—and the U.S. military has created a larger perimeter around it for protection. The U.S. government has asked Americans in Afghanistan to shelter in place until they can be moved out safely; the Qatari ambassador to Afghanistan has been escorting groups of them to the airport. Evacuations have been slower than hoped because of backlogs at the next stage of the journey, but the government has enlisted the help of 18 commercial airlines to move those passengers forward, leaving room for new evacuees.

Yesterday, about 7800 evacuees left the Kabul airport. About 28,000 have been evacuated since August 14.

Interestingly, much of the U.S. media is describing this scenario as a disaster for President Biden. Yet, on CNN this morning, Matthew Dowd, who was the chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney ticket in 2004, noted that more than 20,000 people have been evacuated from Afghanistan without a single loss of an American life, while in the same period of time, 5000 Americans have died from Covid-19 and 500 have died from gunshots.

A Look At Afghanistan's 40 Years Of Crisis — From The Soviet War To Taliban Recapture

 NPR

hANNAH BLOCH

The Soviet army in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Dec. 31, 1979.

Francois Lochon/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

The collapse of the Afghan government and the Taliban's recapture of power came after a blitz by the militant group that stunned many Afghans and the world. It is the latest chapter in the country's nearly 42 years of instability and bitter conflict.

Afghans have lived through foreign invasions, civil war, insurgency and a previous period of oppressive Taliban rule. Here are some key events and dates from the past four decades.

The Soviet war years

December 1979

Following upheaval after a 1978 Afghan coup, the Soviet military invades Afghanistan to prop up a pro-Soviet government.

1980

Babrak Karmal is installed as Afghanistan's Soviet-backed ruler. Groups of guerrilla fighters known as mujahideen or holy warriors mount opposition and a jihad against Soviet forces. The ensuing war leaves about 1 million Afghan civilians and some 15,000 Soviet soldiers dead.

Millions of Afghans begin fleeing to neighboring Pakistan as refugees. The U.S., which had previously been aiding Afghan mujahideen groups, and Saudi Arabia covertly funnel arms to the mujahideen via Pakistan through the 1980s.

Afghan refugees are shown in a camp on Kohat Road outside of Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1980.

Peter Bregg/AP

1983

President Ronald Reagan welcomes Afghan fighters to the White House in 1983, and mujahideen leader Yunus Khalis visits the Oval Office in 1987.

Former President Ronald Reagan meets in the Oval Office in 1983 with Afghan fighters opposing the Soviet Union.

Bettmann/Getty Images

1986

The CIA supplies Stinger antiaircraft missiles to the mujahideen, allowing them to shoot down Soviet helicopter gunships.

An Afghan guerrilla handles a U.S.-made Stinger anti-aircraft missile.

David Stewart Smith/AP

1987

Mohammad Najibullah, groomed by the Soviets, replaces Karmal as president.

1988

The Geneva peace accords are signed by Afghanistan, the Soviet Union, the U.S. and Pakistan, and Soviet forces begin their withdrawal.

Feb. 15, 1989

The last Soviet to leave Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Boris Gromov, walks with his son Maxin on the bridge linking Afghanistan to Uzbekistan over the Amu Darya River. The Soviet commander crossed from the Afghan town of Khairaton.

Tass/AP

The last Soviet soldier leaves Afghanistan.

The 1990s to 2001: Civil war followed by Taliban rule

1992

Following the withdrawal of Soviet forces and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Najibullah's pro-communist government crumbles. He is blocked from leaving Afghanistan and takes refuge at the Kabul United Nations compound, where he remains for more than four years.

Mujahideen leaders enter the capital and turn on each other. Refugees continue to flee in huge numbers to Pakistan and Iran.

The presidential palace in Kabul is severely damaged after being hit by tank shells and rockets fired by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-e-Islami fighters.

Udo Weitz/AP

Kabul, largely spared during the Soviet war, comes under brutal attack by forces loyal to mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Much of the city is left in rubble. The national museum is rocketed and looted. Some 50,000 people are killed.

1994

The Taliban, ultraconservative Afghan student-warriors emerging from mujahideen groups and religious seminaries in Pakistan and Afghanistan, take over the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, promising to restore order and bring greater security. They quickly impose their harsh interpretation of Islam on the territory they control.

A Taliban fighter guards a road southeast of Kabul in 1995.

Saeed Khan/AFP/Getty Images

May 1996

Saudi-born al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden arrives in Afghanistan after being expelled from Sudan, and eventually ingratiates himself with the one-eyed Taliban supreme leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar. Bin Laden had previously aided Afghan mujahideen forces during the Soviet war years as one of many so-called "Afghan Arabs" who joined the anti-Soviet fight.

Osama bin Laden speaks at a press conference in Khost, Afghanistan, in 1998.

Mazhar Ali Khan/AP

Sept. 26, 1996

The Taliban take over Kabul. They capture Najibullah, the former president, from the U.N. compound, kill him and hang his body from a lamppost.

Taliban rally in Kabul, October 1996.

Robert Nickelsberg/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

1997-1998

Gaining control over most of the country, the Taliban impose their rule, forbidding most women from working, banning girls from education and carrying out punishments including beatings, amputations and public executions. Only three countries officially recognize the Taliban regime: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

In August 1998, the U.S. launches cruise missile strikes on Khost, Afghanistan, in retaliation for al-Qaida attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Afghan women wear Taliban-imposed burqas in Kabul.

Roger Lemoyne/Liaison/Getty Images

1999

The U.N. Security Council imposes terrorist sanctions on the Taliban and al-Qaida.

In December, an Indian Airlines passenger jet, bound from Kathmandu to New Delhi, is hijacked to Kandahar. The Taliban serve as mediators between the hijackers and Indian authorities, who decide to free three terrorists from Indian prisons and hand them over to the hijackers in exchange for the passengers' safety.

March 2001

Rejecting international pleas, the Taliban blow up two 1,500-year-old colossal Buddha statues carved into a mountainside in Bamiyan, saying the statues were "idols" prohibited under Islam.

Afghan Taliban in front of the empty niche that held one of the two giant Buddha statues the Taliban blew up in Bamiyan in March 2001.

Saeed Khan/AFP/Getty Images

August 2001

The Taliban put a group of Western aid workers on trial, accusing them of preaching Christianity, a capital offense. Two American women are among the accused.

September 2001

Anti-Taliban Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud is assassinated on Sept. 9 by al-Qaida operatives posing as TV journalists.

After al-Qaida's Sept. 11 attacks in New York City and Washington, the U.S. demands that the Taliban hand over bin Laden. They refuse.

The U.S.-led invasion

Oct. 7, 2001

An undated file photo shows a U.S. Air Force B-52 Stratofortress heavy bomber. The U.S.-led coalition launched air and missile strikes in Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001.

U.S. Air Force/Getty Images

A U.S.-led coalition launches Operation Enduring Freedom, targeting the Taliban and al-Qaida with military strikes.

November-December 2001

The U.S.-backed Northern Alliance enters Kabul on Nov. 13. The Taliban flee south and their regime is overthrown. In December, Hamid Karzai is named interim president after Afghan groups sign the Bonn Agreement on an interim government. Under that agreement, some warlords are named provincial governors, military commanders and cabinet ministers, as are members of the Northern Alliance. The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force is established under a U.N. mandate.

2003

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signals an end to "major combat activity" in Afghanistan, saying, "We clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability and stabilization and reconstruction and activities."

2004

Afghanistan holds a presidential election, won by Hamid Karzai.

2005

Afghanistan's parliament opens after elections bring in lawmakers including old warlords and faction leaders.

The Taliban reemerge

2006

The Taliban seize territory in southern Afghanistan. NATO's ISAF assumes command from the U.S. in the south, something the NATO secretary general calls "one of the most challenging tasks NATO has ever taken on."

2009

Karzai is reelected president.

The U.S. "surge" begins after President Barack Obama orders substantial troop increases in Afghanistan. Obama says that U.S. forces will leave by 2011.

2012

NATO announces it will withdraw foreign combat troops and transfer control of security operations to Afghan forces by the end of 2014.

2013

The Afghan army takes on security operations from NATO forces.

The Obama administration announces plans to start formal peace talks with the Taliban.

2014

After a disputed election, Ashraf Ghani succeeds Karzai as Afghanistan's president. Ghani's rival, Abdullah Abdullah, is named chief executive.

A U.S. soldier walks past burning trucks at the scene of a suicide attack in Afghanistan's Nangarhar province in 2014.

Noorullah Shirzada/AFP/Getty Images

At the end of the year, U.S. and NATO forces formally end their combat missions.

2015

NATO launches its Resolute Support mission to aid Afghan forces. Heavy violence continues as the Taliban step up their attacks on Afghan and U.S. forces and civilians, and take over more territory. At the same time, an Afghan ISIS branch also emerges.

Taliban members and Afghan officials meet informally in Qatar and agree to continue peace talks.

The Taliban make publicly known that Mullah Omar, the group's founder, died years earlier. Mullah Akhtar Mansour is named as the new leader. He is killed the following year in a U.S. drone attack in Pakistan.

2016

The Afghan government grants immunity to former mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, known in the civil war years as the "butcher of Kabul."

2017

Fighting continues between government forces and the Taliban, and attacks attributed to the Taliban and ISIS convulse the country.

The U.S. endgame

2018

President Donald Trump appoints former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad as his special representative to negotiate with the Taliban.

2020

After another disputed election in 2019, Ghani is declared president and Abdullah as head of the government's peace negotiating committee in early 2020.

Violence increases in Kabul. ISIS claims responsibility for some attacks, while others are never claimed. Journalists and rights activists are assassinated. Other targets include a maternity hospital and a girls' school.

U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad and Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar shake hands after signing the U.S.-Taliban peace agreement in Doha, Qatar, on Feb. 29, 2020.

Karim Jaafar/AFP/Getty Images

The U.S. and the Taliban sign a peace agreement in Doha, Qatar, on Feb. 29. The two sides agree on terms including for the U.S. withdrawal of troops and the Taliban to stop attacks on Americans.

Direct Taliban-Afghan government negotiations begin in Doha in September, but quickly stall and never resume in a serious way.

April 14, 2021

President Biden announces the withdrawal of remaining U.S. troops by Sept. 11.

President Joe Biden walks through Arlington National Cemetery in April to honor fallen veterans of the Afghan conflict.

Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

May 2021

The Taliban begin gaining territory in the north.

July 2021

An Afghan National Army soldier stands on a Humvee at Bagram Air Base after all U.S. and NATO troops left, in July.

Zakeria Hashimi/AFP/Getty Images

U.S. troops leave the Bagram Airfield, the key hub for the American war.

August 2021

The Taliban seize control of key cities and provinces, often without a fight. Within days, the only major city not under their control is Kabul.

Ghani flees, the government collapses and the capital comes under Taliban control on Aug. 15. Chaos erupts at the Kabul airport as desperate Afghans try to leave the country and a new era of painful uncertainty begins.

At a press conference on Aug. 17, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid promises an inclusive government, security for aid agencies and embassies and women's rights to work and go to school — within his group's interpretation of sharia law.

Taliban fighters take control of Afghanistan's presidential palace after President Ashraf Ghani fled the country on Sunday.

Zabi Karimi/AP

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