According to the latest USA Today/Gallup poll, support for the Afghan War has dropped by five percent in the week since the release of the WikiLeaks documents, with 43 percent now believing that the war is a “mistake.”
This is the biggest drop since President Obama took office, and suggests that the further we get from the 2001 invasion, the less wise the attack seems to most. In early 2009, only 30 percent thought the invasion was a mistake.
The poll also suggested that the American public’s endless confidence that the war will eventually be won is also floundering, with 62% of Americans now noting that the war is going “badly.”
Though it seems that the WikiLeaks release has brought the ugly truth about the war to a large number of Americans and changed a lot of minds, for many ignorance really was bliss, as a separate poll by Pew Research suggests that 47 percent of Americans believed the leaks “hurt the public interest,” while only 42 percent thought it was a good thing.