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       People hoping to gain access gather outside the international airport in Kabul on Aug. 25, 2021.

       JIM HUYLEBROEK/The New York Times News Service

       For Americans in 2021, the ordeal in Afghanistan is the ultimate Afghanistanism.

       In the ink-stained newsrooms of yore, wizened editors customarily described a wire story about a flood or a coup or an earthquake in a remote part of the world as an Afghanistanism – something to be dropped into the newspaper as a “filler” to round out a column of type. The thinking was that readers didn’t care about Afghanistan and they surely would not care about an avalanche in Nepal or a typhoon in the Solomon Islands.

       Now there is a disaster in the real Afghanistan – and Americans don’t care all that much.

       Last Kabul flight carrying Canadian nationals, Afghan refugees to leave Thursday, five days ahead of U.S. withdrawal deadline

       They care, to be sure, about the safety of American diplomats. They are concerned about American military personnel. They are sympathetic about American aid workers. But the fate of Afghanistan? They would rather the Taliban did not take over the country, but most Americans couldn’t tell you if the word “Taliban” is singular or plural. (It is generally rendered as plural.)

       But a singular tragedy has been unfolding over the past several weeks in Afghanistan, and poll results show that Americans do not consider the identity or character of the country’s government to be of singular importance. The most recent weekly Economist/YouGov poll found that the most important issue for Americans were health care (19 per cent), climate change (14 per cent) and jobs and the economy (13 per cent). “National security” checked in at 9 per cent and foreign policy at 1 per cent.

       To Americans concerned about the coronavirus, battling over vaccine passports, troubled about the economy or preoccupied with climate change, the struggle over the destiny of Afghanistan is a quarrel in a faraway country, between people about whom we know nothing.

       Those descriptions – faraway country, people about whom we know nothing – illuminate the predominant view, and the danger inherent in it, growing out of the upheaval in Afghanistan. They come from remarks by Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who in September, 1938, described what he considered the senselessness of “digging trenches and trying on gas masks here” because of Nazi Germany’s hunger for Czechoslovakia. The reason Americans and their allies, including Canadians, were in Afghanistan in the first place was because the country was used as a training base for the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001.

       “The current debate over troop withdrawal from Afghanistan exemplifies the tension in the United States’ effort over the past 20 years to develop a sensible, effective response to the horrific 9/11 attacks,” said David Schanzer, the director of Duke University’s Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security. “Those bemoaning the withdrawal believe the United States is abandoning its role as the vanguard of democracy and fear that a Taliban takeover of all or most of Afghanistan would dramatically raise the threat of terrorism.”

       But President Joe Biden argues that targeted military force and engagement with Afghanistan’s neighbours is just as effective and far less dangerous for Americans. Besides, Prof. Schanzer explained, U.S. anti-terrorism activities have substantially reduced the danger to the homeland, and Americans don’t think about terrorism much any more.

       They didn’t think about terrorism on Sept. 10, 2001, either. On that day – the day before, you might say – U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech declaring war not on terrorism but on Pentagon bureaucracy, a battle he said was “a matter of life and death.” At the National Press Club in Washington that day before al-Qaeda struck, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee gave a speech asking whether the United States was “ready to make unilateral decisions in what we perceive to be our self-interest.” The speaker was Senator Joe Biden of Delaware.

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       Now, almost 20 years later, Mr. Biden is presiding over the unilateral decision to abandon Afghanistan to the Taliban.

       “History is going to record this was the logical, rational and right decision to make,” he said this week. “When this is over, the American people will have a clear understanding of what I did, why we did it.”

       Troubling images of terrified people at Kabul’s airport still fill television screens and worries about civil liberties and women’s rights still fill newspaper columns – all of which are subliminal attacks on two of the principal rationales for Mr. Biden’s election: the confidence that, despite all his personal foibles, he would bring competent people into his administration; and the conviction that the 46th President is a compassionate man who leads with his heart and feels the world’s pain. Republicans (and some Democrats) are questioning the President’s competence, and Democrats (and some Republicans) are wondering why a man who seemed to be ruled by his emotions has shown so little empathy for the human tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan.

       Many years ago, the great New York Times columnist James Reston said Americans would do anything for Latin America but read about it. If he were still alive, he might rephrase that to say that Americans will do anything about Afghanistan but remain there – or care much about it.

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