Who knows what Afghans think?
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
