The political class loves polls. They tell them — or at least they think they tell them — what the public think. The hunger for polling data has now spread to post-conflict situations. Want to know how things are going in Afghanistan? Commission a poll.
So this week David Miliband has been hitting the airwaves to respond to a new poll of Afghan opinion. The poll, the fourth conducted by an international media consortium since 2005, showed falling support for President Hamid Karzai, and a sharp decline in the proportion of people who think the nation is heading in the right direction, from 77 percent in 2005 to 40 percent now. This sits well with the Asia Foundation’s survey last year, which found that 38 percent of Afghans thought the country was headed in the right direction (compared to 42% in 2007, 44% in 2006, and 64% in 2004).
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