The Afghanistan war has never been a popular area of conflict as far as American’s are concerned and now a new New York Times/CBS poll has revealed that 69% of American’s polled believe the US shouldn’t be in the region.
That 69% result is a drastic increase over the 53% of Americans who believed we shouldn’t be in Afghanistan as of four months ago.
The poll took into consideration the preferences of Democrats and Republicans and found that 68% of Democrats thought the war was going very poorly while 60% of Republicans thought conditions in Afghanistan have not improved.
The poll shows consistent results based on polling numbers from other agencies, signalling a complete shift away from American support for overseas war zones.
In the meantime NATO has already put together a schedule which will hand power of the region back to Afghan forces by the end of 2014 at which point all troops will leave the country. Unfortunately Americans on average believe US troops should leave before that time. In fact only 17% believe the US should stay as long as it takes to stabilize the region.
A military expert at Brookings Institution tells CBS that American’s are only mad at troops remaining in the area because they don’t have a basic grasp of what is at stake in the country. As that expert puts it:
“The overall image of this war is of US troops mired in quicksand and getting blown up, and arbitrarily waiting until 2014 to come home,” while he adds, “Of course you’d be against it.”