Though U.S. public opinion never turned against the war in Afghanistan as it had in Iraq in the mid-2000s, the conflict has helped entrench anti-interventionist views, said Jon Pevehouse, a political science professor at UW-Madison. “It certainly has made (the public) completely unfavorable toward interventions to create democracy or even unseat governments,” Pevehouse said. “I think history will look back and say, ‘Yes, we could have given it a bigger try,’ but the checks would have had to been even larger, the deployments even larger. It would have been hard to imagine the political support for that.”
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