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The Search for New Strategies in Afghanistan

“The honeymoon for America in Afghanistan is over,” declared Craig Charney, polling expert and president of Charney Research.

Speaking at a CNP forum with the Director of the Rand Corporation’s International Security and Defense Policy Sector, former Ambassador James Dobbins, Charney shared the startling results of recent polls conducted by his research firm on public opinion in Afghanistan. (Link here to poll results.)

The overall picture indicates, as Charney said, that “the good war is starting to go bad.” Though Afghans still hold a favorable view of Americans, the toll of years of increasing insecurity and instability has caused attitudes towards America’s activities in Afghanistan to sour. For example, since 2005, the percentage of Afghans who labeled the work of the US in Afghanistan “excellent or good” has dropped to 42 percent while the percentage of those rating it as “fair or poor” has risen from 30 to 52 percent over the same time period. The roots of this unease, Charney’s polling shows, lie in concerns over the resurgence of the Taliban, the prevalence of corruption among Afghan government officials, economic progress and civilian casualties of coalition warfare.

Charney’s data indicated that Afghans reported much more favorable impressions of multinational forces and their actions in those areas where they were most numerous. However, Afghans reacted negatively to US/NATO forces when they them responsible for civilian casualties. Multinational forces in Afghanistan often supplement regions with sparse troop presences by relying on airpower, frequently incurring civilian casualties and earning the ire of many Afghans. With the goodwill earned by international forces and the political risks entailed in the use of airpower, Charney concluded that NATO and the United States should put “more boots on the ground and less bombs on the ground.” Charney wanted more Afghans in those boots, who understood the language and people, through the expansion of the Afghan National Army. Charney did note, however, one important positive: Afghan President Hamid Karzai remains quite popular, with a 62% favorable rating, which most political leaders would envy.

Ambassador Dobbins noted that for the first several years after the fall of the Taliban Afghanistan remained “the least resourced of American nation-building operation in the last 60 years.” Compared to the $800 per capita per annum that the international community spent on rebuilding Bosnia, Afghanistan, despite the importance of the region to international security, received only approximately $50 per Afghan per year in international assistance for the first several years after the installation of the Karzai government.

Dobbins remarked that more than six years of experience living among and fighting alongside Afghans has provided American forces with many critically-needed counterinsurgency skills. “They’re on that learning curve and improving.”

Dobbins believes that Afghanistan’s problems lie both inside and outside its borders. “The insurgency we’re dealing with is not uniquely an Afghan insurgency,” he said, “It may not even be principally an Afghan insurgency. It’s an insurgency supplied, directed, organized, trained, equipped and to some degree recruited in Pakistan.” Afghanistan’s problems, Dobbins summarized, must be solved on both a national and regional basis.