Bad News for Biden: It Looks Like Voters Aren't Going to Let Fatal Afghan Withdrawal Be Forgotten
When President Joe Biden was elected in November under hotly contested circumstances, he was supposed to be the most popular presidential candidate in our nation’s history, receiving more than 81 million votes.
The magic of this remarkable achievement wore off pretty quickly once he took up the post of commander-in-chief, however.
In less than a year, his administration has overseen crippling inflation, a horrific humanitarian crisis at the border and a return to pre-9/11 conditions in Afghanistan as the Taliban retook the nation with ease before our troops — and our civilians — had withdrawn.
It’s been a mess and a disaster. And now, the people who voted for and against the most popular presidential candidate in U.S. history want answers.
It’s not just Republicans, although they’re certainly making the most noise. Last week, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton was joined by over two dozen of his colleagues who demanded answers on what went wrong in Afghanistan.
A solid majority of voters believe that Congress should investigate the withdrawal.
Yes, Biden is turning out to be quite the historical president — although more so for his administration’s quickly-earned notoriety than succusses at this rate.
A Rasmussen Reports survey released last week found that while less than one-third of likely voters believed the Afghanistan withdrawal was a success (those are some optimistic likely voters), nearly two-thirds believed that the handling of the withdrawal should be investigated.
The national online and phone survey of 1,000 likely voters was conducted Aug. 30-31, as the last of the U.S. troops were pulling out of the nation and Americans, including schoolchildren, were left stranded in the Taliban-controlled nation.
The poll had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points with a 95 percent level of confidence.
Sixty-two percent of those surveyed responded affirmatively to the question, “Should Congress investigate how the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was handled?”
Twenty-eight percent of those surveyed opposed a congressional investigation (imagine opposing government accountability at a time like this), while 10 percent were not sure.
Here’s the thing: the refrain from the Democrats over the last month has been that what happened in Afghanistan was the fault of former President Donald Trump, who negotiated a peace treaty with the Taliban and set a withdrawal date for May of this year before leaving office.
It certainly stands to reason that any voter would want Congress to investigate what happened regardless of who was to blame.
Yet it was under the command of Biden’s military leaders that the United States appeared to completely abandon the Afghan national army to the mercy of the Taliban and left billions of dollars worth of equipment in their hands.
It is these same military officials — Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley — on whom over 100 retired military officers have called to resign.
It is Biden who appeared to advise the now-deposed Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to give the public impression that the Taliban wasn’t winning in July if he wanted to receive more U.S. aid, according to Reuters.
It is Biden who was running things when thousands of Americans were scrambling to evacuate and when hundreds were abandoned in the country after we withdrew.
It is the Biden administration that was facilitating the chaotic evacuation and that gave the Taliban the names of Americans and U.S.-allied Afghans as the terror group appeared to control the entrance to the Kabul airport in the final days of the withdrawal.
And it was Biden who was commander-in-chief when Islamic State group terrorists detonated a suicide vest and opened fire upon the crush of desperate civilians trying to flee Afghanistan in an attack that killed 13 U.S. service members, the worst single-day casualty event our forces had seen in 11 years.
The American people are right to want answers — and it is from President Joe Biden that they must be demanded.
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