After eight years, opinions about Afghanistan are pretty well set, and drifting downward.
National Journal
Saturday, Dec. 12, 2009
by Will Englund
Unpopular wars don't become popular. It has never happened in American history -- at least while they're still being fought. President Obama's speech last week at West Point sparked an uptick in support for the war in Afghanistan, but an uptick is not a long-term trend. After eight years, opinions about Afghanistan are pretty well set, and drifting downward. Obama probably won't be able to swing huge numbers of Americans into the pro-war camp. Yet he may not need to. If he can keep support for his policies above the 50 percent level, where it's hovering now, that should leave him, politically, in good shape on Afghanistan. But can he?
Experience shows that polls fluctuate from moment to moment, but the larger course of public opinion isn't greatly affected by the ups and downs of particular events. The Iraq war became more popular after Saddam Hussein was captured, notes John E. Mueller, professor of national security studies at Ohio State University, and less popular after the Abu Ghraib photos came out. In both cases, support quickly returned to its previous level. Support for the Korean War plunged after the Chinese joined the fighting, but that was while the conflict was still in the early going; the meter didn't move much until the end was in sight. Opposition to the Vietnam War gathered over time.
The key, for Obama, is to frame his effort in Afghanistan as vital to Americans' security and convince the public that the commitment can have a good outcome, say those who have made a study of public opinion in wartime. That doesn't necessarily mean complete and total victory over all enemies; a sufficient level of stability may be enough. Iraq -- if it doesn't all unravel, as it shows signs of doing -- would seem to be a useful model. The war there is still hugely unpopular (it will always be George W. Bush's war), but the decline in violence has moved it off the front burner.
If Obama can convince the American people that action now will similarly put Afghanistan on a back burner later, that should be enough. He took a step in that direction with his speech at West Point. The White House acknowledges that it's only a first step. But Obama also has to demonstrate to war supporters -- concentrated on the Republican end of the political spectrum -- that he really means it, says Peter Feaver, a political scientist at Duke University who worked for a time on President Bush's National Security Council on the question of public opinion and the Iraq war. Feaver argued in 2005 that Bush needed to project a sense of victory in Iraq; the president tried but failed. He argues today that Obama has to demonstrate to those who would support his war policy that he means to stick with it -- that he won't try to put it on a back burner too soon.
"He has to show he's committed to it and that he views it not as a distraction from his main job," Feaver says.
Obama's taking possession of the war in Afghanistan in midstream is inevitably a difficult proposition and potentially a treacherous one. In 1969, the White House switched from the Democrats to the Republicans and so did support for the Vietnam War. The Democrats had been the more hawkish party while Lyndon Johnson was president, but that changed almost the moment Richard Nixon was sworn in. Polls showed that Democratic support, which had been trending down since 1967, essentially collapsed, while Republicans' opinions remained fairly constant.
Nixon was the third president in a span of 25 years to have inherited a war upon taking office, and the least successful. Harry Truman saw World War II to victory. Dwight Eisenhower went to South Korea, sought an immediate truce (which had the effect of temporarily making the Korean War more popular), and was able to bring the fighting to a quick suspension. Nixon made the Vietnam War his own -- and in some sense Obama could be seen as following his path.
There are essential differences, though. Obama is not likely to see the other party's support for the war evaporate, as Nixon did. "The we've-got-to-see-this-thing-through wing of the Republican Party is less likely to be flipped because Obama is for it," Feaver says. Because of 9/11, polls show, Americans are still, all these years later, more likely to view Afghanistan as a paramount national concern than they did Vietnam.
And there's this: Nixon ran as a peace candidate and then expanded a war. Obama said he was going to finish the job in Afghanistan, and that's how he pitches his recent escalation.
In fact, it was a standard Democratic talking point during the Bush era that the Democrats were more reliable on national security because they would address the real problem -- in Afghanistan, not in Iraq. Now that the main opposition to Obama on Afghanistan is coming from his own party, he's going to have to find a way to contain it.
One factor to consider, in the view of Adam Berinsky, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has just written In Time of War: Understanding American Public Opinion From World War II to Iraq, is that Americans don't pay that much attention to the issues. They take their cues from the elites, he argues -- positive cues from those politicians they feel in sync with, negative cues from those they don't. Few Americans bother to become conversant with the policy questions of the day, he says. Republicans began to shed their isolationism in 1940, for example, because their presidential candidate, Wendell Willkie, spoke in favor of helping the Allies. Public opposition to the Vietnam War, Berinsky suggests, followed the growing disenchantment among Democratic members of Congress such as Sen. William Fulbright, not the other way around.
Obama still enjoys the advantage of high personal ratings among Democrats. Berinsky says that this could translate into the feeling that "if Obama thinks this is a good idea, maybe it's something we should support." He isn't talking about enthusiasm but tolerance, and that may be enough.
Mueller found that during the Vietnam War, public opinion often swung in behind public policy. In September 1965, 30 percent of Americans thought that the U.S. should start bombing Hanoi or Haiphong. In July 1966, after the bombing had started, 85 percent supported it. In April 1968, after Johnson had imposed a partial halt, just 26 percent remained in favor.
But what if Obama enjoys more success with his strategy than Johnson did? Wouldn't progress count for something? After all, a string of Union victories in 1864 seemingly revived Abraham Lincoln's faltering re-election campaign. But there is no evidence (from that pre-polling era) that the popularity of the war was transformed, from negative to positive or in any other direction, by the battlefield victories; and Lincoln might have won at the polls anyway. In the larger sense, of course, the Civil War bears no relation to Afghanistan. The fate of the nation depended directly on its outcome, and several million young men were fighting in it. It was like World War II, where popular support continued over four years, in the face of tremendous losses, and even as -- in the latter case -- polling showed that Americans weren't always sure what the war was about. With the future of the country at stake, that's bearable.
Afghanistan is difficult and limited. It is not the first such war that America has fought in Asia. Vietnam was a disaster. The Korean conflict became unpopular faster than the one in Vietnam, although toward the end "doubt over the wisdom of the war apparently had begun to be replaced by a need to rationalize the loss," Mueller wrote in 1971. In the decade after it halted, the Korean War gained considerable retrospective support (much the way the highly unpopular War of 1812 did).
The Philippine insurgency at the beginning of the 20th century, on the other hand, came to a more palatable end, at least from Washington's perspective. It was ugly and unpopular at home, especially after it was reported that U.S. soldiers were waterboarding captured guerrillas. The Anti-Imperialist League, rooted in the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, flourished as the principal voice of an opposition that grew stronger every year.
But in 1902 Theodore Roosevelt declared the war to be over (even though fighting continued sporadically until 1913), and the domestic opposition -- and attention -- melted away. That was three years after the insurgency began. If Obama's Afghan clock starts ticking now (and Mueller makes a case for resetting it to the present), that gives him until Election Day 2012 to accomplish what Roosevelt did, and put the war behind him.