Available evidence suggests Jason’s prediction has largely come true.

1. Condition about no new 9/11‑scale attack
   Since the August 2021 withdrawal there have been serious terrorist incidents, including the 2025 New Orleans truck attack (15 killed), but nothing remotely on the scale of 9/11’s ~3,000 deaths or its transformative political impact. These attacks are described as among the deadliest since 9/11, not comparable to it, and they have not produced a broad push to re‑enter Afghanistan. (en.wikipedia.org)

2. Enduring support for ending the war / “thank God that’s over” sentiment
   Polls conducted during and after the withdrawal consistently show that most Americans supported the decision to pull out, even while criticizing how it was executed:

• Pew (Aug 23–29, 2021): 54% said withdrawing troops from Afghanistan was the right decision, 42% said it was wrong. (pewresearch.org)
• Marquette (Sept 7–16, 2021): 74% supported withdrawing all U.S. troops; only 26% opposed. (law.marquette.edu)
• Washington Post/ABC News poll: 77% supported the decision to withdraw all forces, across both parties, even though most disapproved of Biden’s handling. (ifpnews.com)
• Monmouth (Sept 2021): 66% approved of the decision to withdraw the U.S. presence, vs. 27% who disapproved, while opinions on Biden’s handling were much more negative. (monmouth.edu)

Follow‑up polling indicates war‑weariness and relief at being out of Afghanistan rather than a desire to re‑engage:

• Gallup (Aug 2022, one year after withdrawal) found 50% of Americans say sending troops to Afghanistan was a mistake, the highest level yet, signaling a sour retrospective view of the war itself, not nostalgia for staying. (news.gallup.com)
• A YouGov/Concerned Veterans for America poll (Aug 17–19, 2021, already after Taliban advances) found 60% supported bringing troops home, 51% wanted less U.S. military engagement abroad, only 29% favored redeploying troops to Afghanistan, and 67% said domestic issues should be prioritized over foreign policy. (cv4a.org)
• More broadly, a 2025 Reuters/Ipsos poll found 58% of Americans oppose deploying U.S. troops abroad unless facing a clear external threat, reflecting a durable reluctance to restart large ground wars. (reuters.com)

Taken together, these data points support Jason’s claim that the dominant long‑run attitude would be relief that the 20‑year war is over, even among many who think the exit was botched.

3. Fading salience of the chaotic withdrawal images
   The specific Kabul airport scenes (people clinging to planes, the Abbey Gate bombing) were intensely visible in late August 2021 but quickly receded as a top‑of‑mind concern for the general public:

• Even during the crisis, a Reuters/Ipsos poll (Aug 27–30, 2021) found only 10% of Americans named the Afghanistan war as the country’s most important problem; Afghanistan was already a low‑salience issue despite wall‑to‑wall media coverage. (ipsos.com)
• A Gallup analysis on the defense budget and Afghanistan noted that almost no Americans mentioned Afghanistan as the most important problem facing the country and that over half said they did not follow news about U.S. involvement there—evidence that, even before the final pullout, Afghanistan was “essentially out of mind” for most Americans. (news.gallup.com)
• By late 2023, AP‑NORC polling on priorities for 2024 shows foreign policy concern rising because of Ukraine, Israel‑Hamas, and China, but Afghanistan is not cited as a key issue; the top concerns are the economy and domestic matters. (apnews.com)
• Coverage of the 2022 midterms similarly emphasizes inflation, the economy, abortion, and democracy as dominant issues; CBS and other analysts explicitly predicted Afghanistan would be only “a relatively short chapter” in the campaign narrative, which proved accurate—Afghanistan was not a major voter issue. (cbsnews.com)

These patterns are what you would expect if the dramatic imagery from August 2021 had largely faded from everyday public salience: it still appears in partisan rhetoric and among veterans and activists, but it is not a sustained, central concern for most voters.

4. Countervailing evidence is limited to subgroups
   Some groups remain intensely negative about the withdrawal and continue to invoke the Kabul imagery:

• A Mission Roll Call survey of ~5,500 U.S. veterans found 73% said the withdrawal negatively affected their view of America’s legacy in the Global War on Terror. (militarytimes.com)
• Republican politicians and the Trump administration continue to highlight the “disastrous and embarrassing” withdrawal and the Abbey Gate bombing; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered yet another review in 2025. (apnews.com)
  However, Jason’s prediction was about the overall American public, not these more engaged or partisan subgroups. National polling and issue‑priority data indicate that, while these voices are loud, they do not define the majority view.

Synthesis
By late 2025:

• No 9/11‑scale attack has occurred to re‑link Afghanistan directly to mass‑casualty terrorism in the U.S.
• Majorities or pluralities consistently endorse the decision to leave Afghanistan or oppose new large troop deployments, and retrospective judgment of the war itself has turned increasingly negative—consistent with a broad sense of “good that it’s over.” (pewresearch.org)
• Afghanistan barely appears in lists of top national problems or campaign issues after 2021, signalling that the airport‑chaos imagery no longer has strong day‑to‑day salience for most Americans. (ipsos.com)

Given these points, Jason’s forecast—that the long‑term dominant public posture would be relief that the war is over and that the vivid withdrawal images would recede from public focus, absent another 9/11‑like attack—is best assessed as right.