Over the past few days, President Joe Biden has completely mishandled the withdrawal of United Stated troops from Afghanistan. A new poll released Monday found a majority of Americans have come to agree with this fact.
According to the poll conducted by the Trafalgar Group, 69.3 percent of Americans disapprove of Biden’s handling of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, including 59.5 percent who strongly disapprove. Only 23.1 percent approved of Biden’s handling of the situation, and 7.5 percent had no opinion.
The poll was conducted among 1,084 respondents between Saturday and Sunday, and it has a margin of error of +/- 2.98 percentage points.
When broken down by party affiliation, the results arguably look even worse for Biden and his administration.
Among Democrats, 48.2 percent disapproved of Biden’s handling of military operations in Afghanistan. Just 39.8 percent approved, and 12 percent had no opinion.
An astounding 88.8 percent of Republicans disapproved of Biden’s actions in Afghanistan, including 8o percent who strongly disapproved. Only 7.1 percent of Republicans approved of Biden’s handling of the situation.
As all of these numbers show, Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to Biden’s actions in Afghanistan. Not only do a majority of Republicans disapprove of his actions, but a plurality of Democrats do too.
There are many reasons why Americans disapprove of Biden’s actions over the last few days. For one thing, his rushed and ill-planned exit has left both American citizens and Afghan allies stranded.
According to The Hill, Biden has plans to rescue “thousands” of Americans who remain stuck in Afghanistan.
“As we carry out this departure, we have made it clear to the Taliban: If they attack our personnel or disrupt our operation, the U.S. presence will be swift and the response will be swift and forceful,” he said in a Monday news conference, according to an official White House transcript of his remarks. “We will defend our people with devastating force if necessary.”
Yes, threatening terrorists is usually an effective way to get them to do what you want.
Even if the U.S. is able to get all of our citizens safely out of Afghanistan, Biden has created a completely unnecessary disaster by pushing forward a withdrawal without having the necessary plans in place.
According to The Washington Post, there were officially 2,500 American troops in Afghanistan when Biden announced his withdrawal plan in April.
In his speech Monday, Biden said he had authorized 6,000 American troops to be sent to Afghanistan to “to deploy to Afghanistan for the purpose of assisting in the departure of U.S. and Allied civilian personnel from Afghanistan.”
Any way you slice it, Biden’s incompetency in creating an exit strategy resulted in over twice the original number of troops being sent to the very country he was trying to withdraw from. That is hardly a successful result.
Biden continued by attempting to paint himself in a positive light, saying a continued military presence in Afghanistan “is not what the American people want.”
While that may or may not be true, one thing the American people clearly don’t want is the complete disaster brought on by the Biden administration. Trafalgar’s poll results make that fact very clear.
If the administration had devised an actual plan for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, it may have been able to gain support from a majority of Americans. Instead, its utter incompetence has resulted in widespread disapproval.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.