The situation in Afghanistan is bad, but not as bad as I thought

I attended an event today with David Langer head of polling of ABC.  Langer was very impressive, the poll hit all corners of Afghanistan and its methodology seems sound to me.   David Lettis over at Next America summarizes the presentation and throws up links to the podcast and video.  If you want to know more about what the Afghan’s think, skim the full presentation.

Ackerman had read other coverage and brakes down the details on Afghan support for the occupation:

What’s surprising about the poll is that the Afghans don’t appear to take the jump from “everything sucks and I don’t trust the United States to keep me safe” to “the United States is an illegitimate occupying force that I will not support.” Nearly 60 percent say the Taliban is the biggest threat to Afghanistan, but only eight percent say U.S. forces are. Support for attacks on U.S. troops are transactional, dependent on where there haven’t been airstrikes that kill civilians: it’s 44 percent in areas where the United States has recently launched airstrikes, and 18 percent where it hasn’t.

In general there is not support for more NATO troop presence.  However, those areas with substantial numbers of international forces tend to be most positive.  The airstrikes tend to happen where we’re weak.  Dr. Cordesman argued that it’s important to differentiate between air strikes done with substantial advance planning, those done with bad intel, and close air support of coalition troops in tough fights.  I was a bit surprised that he seemed to be arguing  that the planned in advance bombings did not anger the populace in the way that the tactically necessary close air support did.  Most all of the really controversial civilian casualties I’ve heard about were from bombings, admittedly he did allow for bad intel bombings but I don’t recall hearing about massacres resulting from close air support.

There’s local support for negotiation, but with preconditions that the Taliban should stop fighting.  One key divergence from Iraq, by and large people seem to have no confidence in local militias.  Only 18% of people think they can provide security and 17% think they’ve got strong local support.  The numbers for the Taliban are about half that with Coalition forces being around 40% and legitimate government institutions all being 60%+.  I tend to favor a more provincial approach, so I’m going to have to look at the data there closely to see what the Afghans are saying about that.  Langer did mention that the ratings of provincial governments tend to vary on the basis of development factors while the national government was judged on both security and development.

So what’s the better than expected news?

• There’s no real variance across ethnic groups and 77%Afghans first and their own ethnicity second. Afghanistan may not have a traditional of strong national governments, but that doesn’t mean they have ethnic separatists.
• While we’ve been dropping about 8-10% points in terms of support each year, we do still have the majority.  So long as that’s true I favor sticking it out.
• While the security situation has gotten worse and have dragged down living conditions, local conditions have improved in terms of basic necessities and infrastructure.  The economy is still doing terribly but is actually a trifle better than in 2007.  This suggests to me that we’ve gotten better with development aid and that if we can improve the security situation we may be in a position to consolidate improvements.

From this report, I’d say we’re losing in Afghanistan but that we have not lost.  The situation is going to be hard to handle, I’m not sure that we can.  I haven’t heard anything strategically that greatly reassures me that we’re improving on any front other than the amount of resources.  That said, resources do matter.  Langer repeatedly emphasized that those areas where we had a strong presence, we were popular which Cordesman reasonably argued showed the benefits of Clear, Holding, and Building rather than just clearing.