One year after Afghan war, Biden struggles to find footing
WASHINGTON » The 12 months since the chaotic end to the U.S. war in Afghanistan haven’t been easy for Joe Biden.
The new president was flying high early in the summer of 2021, the American electorate largely approving of Biden’s performance and giving him high marks for his handling of the economy and the coronavirus pandemic.
But come August, the messy U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan seemed to mark the start of things going sideways for him.
It was a disquieting bookend to the 20-year American war: the U.s.backed Afghan government collapsed, a grisly bombing killed 13 U.S. troops and 170 others, and thousands of desperate Afghans descended on Kabul’s airport in search of a way out before the final U.S. cargo planes departed over the Hindu Kush.
The disastrous drawdown was, at the time, the biggest crisis that the relatively new administration had faced. It left sharp questions about Biden and his team’s competence and experience — the twin pillars central to his campaign for the White House.
As the one-year anniversary of the end of the Afghan war nears, the episode — a turning point in Biden’s presidency — continues to resonate as he struggles to shake dismal polling numbers and lift American confidence in his administration ahead of November’s critical midterm elections.
“It was a pivotal moment that he hasn’t ever really recovered from,” said Christopher Borick, director of the Institute of Public Opinion at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania. “Things were going really well in terms of how voters viewed him in terms of bringing stability to the economy and how the government addressed the pandemic, issues that are higher priorities to the American electorate than the war in Afghanistan. But Afghanistan cracked that image of competency, and he hasn’t ever really been able to repair it.”
The Afghanistan debacle was just the start of a series of crises for Biden.
As Biden was still dealing with fallout from the Afghan withdrawal last summer, COVID-19 cases began spiking again. Layered over that in coming were months were strains on the economy caused by inflation, labor shortages and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The sum of it left Americans weary.
In the weeks before Afghanistan went sideways, Biden was riding high. His approval rating stood at 59% in a July 2021 poll by The Associated PRESS-NORC Center for Public Affairs
Research. An AP-NORC poll conducted last month put his rating at 36%.
White House officials and Biden allies hope the president is now at another turning point — this one in his favor.