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Afghans: What Hearts and Minds?

President Obama is in the course of ramping up America's involvement in Afghanistan. Most informed assessment and commentary counsels against it, cautioning that the US will be end up in the already war-racked country longer than the Soviets did and that it will become another Vietnam-style quagmire.

The Administration may do well to have regard to a survey of the Afghans - as discussed in this piece "Afghan Hearts and Minds" from The New Yorker:

"There is a lot of bad news in the poll of Afghan public opinion released yesterday by ABC News, the BBC, and ARD. More of those surveyed now regard the United States unfavorably (fifty-two per cent) than favorably (forty-seven per cent). In 2005, the favorability rating of the U.S. was eighty-three per cent.

Only eighteen per cent of Afghans think the U.S. decision to send more troops to the country is a good idea; forty-four per cent want fewer troops. This skepticism seems to be associated with a broad belief that U.S. military action has not and will not improve the security of Afghan civilians. The Taliban remain unpopular—more unpopular than the United States—but the gap is closing, and larger numbers of Afghans now see the Taliban as “more moderate” than in the past.

Civilian casualties caused by N.A.T.O. air strikes were described as unacceptable by almost eighty per cent of those surveyed. It should hardly be a surprise, then, that Hamid Karzai, as he seeks reëlection to the presidency, speaks out against these bombing raids. The heavy reliance on air strikes by N.A.T.O. forces is partly a result of the lack of boots on the ground. Their continuing prominence seems also to reflect the tactics of lightly manned Special Forces units engaged in counterterrorism operations, who must rely on air cover to extract themselves from ambushes and the like. Overall, air power has allowed N.A.T.O. to prevent the Taliban from operating in large formations or from taking and holding territory in a formal way, which is obviously important. But the strategic costs in Afghan public opinion have clearly reached a breaking point. The Afghans were bombed unmercifully by the Soviets during the nineteen-eighties; N.A.T.O. can congratulate itself all it likes on how much better calibrated its own operations are, but it cannot erase the collective memory of Afghan civilians, whose tolerance for foreign warplanes is understandably brittle."

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