The findings of a new Washington Post poll of Afghans are rather striking, but they don’t fit with the Post‘s headline, “Afghan poll shows falling confidence in U.S. efforts to secure country.”
“Afghans are more pessimistic about the direction of their country, less confident in the ability of the United States and its allies to provide security and more willing to negotiate with the Taliban than they were a year ago, according to a new poll conducted in all of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces,” the Post‘s report begins. But if you look at the actual results of the poll it becomes clear that a comparison between this year’s numbers and last year’s lacks important context.
Now, 59% of Afghans say that the country is on the right track. That’s an 11-point drop from late December 2009–but the poll from a year ago was conducted during the weeks following President Obama’s surge announcement, when Afghans were apparently unusually optimistic that the country was heading on the right track. The “right track” number now is much higher than it was two years ago in January 2009 (40%), and it’s even higher now than it was in 2007 (54%) or 2006 (55%). Furthermore, 62% of Afghans nationwide support the presence of U.S. troops in the country, while only 11% support the presence of Taliban fighters. So the picture nationwide doesn’t seem as bleak as the Post reports.
The bigger problem with the Post‘s report is that it emphasizes small declines in the support for U.S. troops among all Afghans, while it downplays the poll’s more remarkable findings that the surge has dramatically improved the security situation in Helmand and Kandahar, “two key southern provinces that have been the focus of U.S. military operations over the past year”:
71 percent now rate their living conditions as “good,” up from 44 percent late last year, and 59 percent give positive marks to the availability of jobs, up from just 14 percent. In both southern provinces, public assessments of the availability of clean water and medical care are sharply higher than they were a year ago, running counter to trends elsewhere.
So, in the provinces where U.S. forces have actually focused their counterinsurgency operations, the percentage of residents who say security is good has increased by a whopping 53 points. That’s a bigger deal than the single-digit decline in support among Afghans for U.S. and NATO troops countrywide from one year ago.
It seems that the Post missed the big takeaway from its own poll: the surge forces are improving the security situation in Afghanistan.
