A new poll shows that a narrow majority of Americans would support the President were he to pull troops out of Afghanistan. Less than a quarter of those polled said they would oppose it.
“The survey also indicates Americans remain unconvinced that the United States has a clear purpose in Afghanistan,” explains the January 10 press release of the Charles Koch Institute, which commissioned the poll. “Almost half of respondents, 45 percent, said the United States has no strategic objective, while only 21 percent said it does. About one-third (34 percent) said they did not know.”
However you slice the public opinion data, the wars in the Mid-East are not gaining in popularity. A plurality of Americans polled want out of Syria, too — no matter “whether the conflict was framed around the Syrian civil war or to counter-ISIS.”
Lucy Steigerwald, writing at Reason, highlights the incoherence in the White House and Pentagon: “no one seems to know what the hell is going on.” Which just shows how far we have come, after all these years. “The long life of the Afghan war makes it hard to remember how popular it was when it began.”
But back then it all seemed so clear: get Osama bin Laden, destroy his training camps, and punish the Taliban for harboring him.
All that was accomplished long ago. Now our leaders fear pulling out because … we haven’t established a western democracy there?
That was never going to happen.
It is foolish — even immoral — to keep a war going with impossible and incoherent goals.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
1 reply on “War Lust Flags”
“It is foolish — even immoral — to keep a war going with impossible and incoherent goals.”
That may qualify as the understatement of the year. The U.S. has no moral or legal grounds to stand on in Afghanistan, and in my opinion anyone involved in persecuting that war should be tried as a mass murderer.