The eyes of the world are on the polls in Afghanistan. In the White House, eyes will be on a poll in the Washington Post.
"A majority of Americans now see the war in Afghanistan as not worth fighting, and just a quarter say more U.S. troops should be sent to the country… nearly twice as many, 45 percent, want to decrease the number of military forces there." What will most concern President Barack Obama's advisers is that "seven in 10 Democrats say the war has not been worth its costs, and fewer than one in five support an increase in troop levels."
That Mr. Obama is in the soup on health care should come as no surprise to Canadians, given our inability/unwillingness to reform our own system over the years. One also understands Americans' growing concerns about the President's handling of the economy, as reflected in a Gallup poll published on Monday. However, given Canadians' continuing joy at the replacement of George Bush by Barack Obama, it may come as a surprise that the percentage of Americans opposed to the Afghanistan war is now equal to those opposed to the Iraq war in 2004. And it would be much higher were it not for the support of Republicans.
Mr. Obama says that Afghanistan, unlike Iraq, is a good war worth fighting; he has increased U.S. troop levels, and will soon receive another request for additional troops. And, as an opinion piece in today's Globe should make clear, Afghanistan is now the kind of war traditionally championed by liberal interventionists. With the President's political base offside, however, one has to wonder how much longer the U.S. will be prepared to keep fighting that war.