Just one in four Americans approve of Biden’s management of Afghan withdrawal, poll finds

White House has taken fire over abandonment of Afghans and security of Americans

Only about a quarter of Americans give President Joe Biden positive marks on his handling of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, even as a majority still says that America’s exit is a good idea overall.

A poll from USA Today/Suffolk University taken 19-23 August shows just 26 per cent of respondents approving of how Mr Biden has managed the evacuations from Kabul, while 53 per cent agreed that the US still needed to leave the country.

The poll illustrates the wide gap between how those who support a withdrawal expected the US government to manage the removal of US civilians and their allies, and the actual reality that unfolded over the last week following the fall of Kabul to Taliban forces last Sunday.

Support for the US withdrawal in general has dipped in recent days but was the view of a wide majority of Americans earlier this year. Until recently, however, US leaders had expressed confidence in Afghanistan’s now-toppled government and its ousted president, Ashraf Ghani, who fled the country as Taliban forces descended upon the capital.

As recently as last month, Mr Biden had dismissed assertions that the fall of Afghanistan’s government was imminent, and in recent days he and other White House officials have admitted that the collapse occurred far more rapidly than the administration had expected.

That rapid collapse has been one of the factors blamed by Mr Biden and others for the chaotic scenes that were splashed across social media last weekend, as US officials have said that they did not begin mass evacuations earlier due to a desire to not cause a panic or loss of confidence in Mr Ghani’s government.

“I know there are concerns about why we did not begin evacuating Afghan civilians sooner,” Mr Biden said in an address to the nation on the Afghanistan withdrawal last Monday.

“Part of the answer is some of the Afghans did not want to leave earlier, still hopeful for their country. Part of it was because the Afghan government and its supporters discouraged us from organizing a mass exodus to avoid triggering, as they said, a crisis of confidence,” he said.

The USA Today/Suffolk University poll surveyed responses from 1,000 registered voters across the US, and has a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.