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Most Afghans are increasingly optimistic about the state of their country, a poll commissioned by the BBC, ABC News and Germany’s ARD shows. Of more than 1,500 Afghans questioned, 70% said they believed Afghanistan was going in the right direction – a big jump from 40% a year ago. Of those questioned, 68% now back the presence of US troops in Afghanistan, compared with 63% a year ago. For NATO troops support has risen from 59% to 62%. Jeb Sharp talks with the BBC’s Mark Dummett in Kabul.

• BBC coverage
• Full survey (pdf)

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JEB SHARP: This may strike you as counter-intuitive but Afghans are more optimistic about their country’s future than we Americans are about ours.  An opinion poll commissioned by the BBC, ABC, and ARD and conducted in Afghanistan bears this out.  Seventy percent of Afghans say their country is heading in the right direction.  Forty percent of  Americans feel that way.  And, get this, seventy-two percent of Afghans approve of the job President Hamid Karzai is doing.  President Obama’s approval ratings are about fifty percent. The BBC’s Mark Dummett is in Kabul.  Mark, we get lots of bad news from Afghanistan about violence, corruption, electoral fraud.  We’ve heard many interviews within individuals recently denouncing the foreign forces as occupiers much as the Soviets were seen.  How does this poll jive with your own reporting in Afghanistan?

MARK DUMMETT: Well, it surprised me. It surprised many of the Afghans who I’ve spoken to today as well be they people in the street or politicians or civil society activists who I’ve been able to interview. It surprised all of us because as you say the news has been so unrelentingly awful really for the past twelve months.  That’s why everybody is really so surprised by these results, but they are extremely interesting and revealing because what they seem to suggest is two things really. Now that the election process is basically out of the way, Afghans are prepared to fall behind President Karzai and they’re also relieved that that process ended without a return to a fully fledged civil war.

And secondly, there’s a belief maybe that General Stanley McChrystal’s new counter-insurgency strategy for Afghanistan is working because levels of support for foreign troops particularly U.S. troops has gone up. People blame them less than they did a year ago for civilian casualties and, of course, that has been one of his main drives really. So that seems to have paid off, and that could be one of the major reasons why people are feeling a bit more positive about the direction this country is going in.

SHARP: Mark, let me ask you specifically about that. What were the responses like in the poll to the international mission and especially attitudes toward the American forces.

DUMMETT: The BBC and ABC have been carrying out these surveys since 2005.  But in 2005 sixty-eight percent of Afghans said that the U.S. was either doing an excellent or good job here. That fell back to thirty-two percent last year, but it’s gone back up again to thirty-eight percent this year. Now, a small rise but the American military leadership here will no doubt be looking at these figures and thinking that the downward trend has been reversed, and we are becoming more popular. And that trend is replicated in some of the other statistics that come out of this survey. And as a reverse support for the Taliban has dropped this year.

SHARP: There’s an interesting detail on the Taliban. The approval has dropped but forty-three percent of Afghans want an Islamic state, and that’s ahead of the thirty-two percent who want a quote “democracy.”  What do you make of that?

DUMMETT: Well, I mean, that doesn’t really surprise me and this goes some way towards explaining this apparent contradiction between the high numbers of people who believe that President Karzai in some way or other stole his re-election. But those who still support him as president. I mean, a lot of Afghans as this survey shows believe that American style of democracy is just simply the wrong system of government for Afghanistan. I mean, people don’t think that simply works here. And, of course, you know this country has never really seen this before. It’s an experiment really which a lot of people here would argue is failing.

SHARP: Now the poll itself as you say they’ve interviewed people in all 34 provinces. They spent two weeks in December interviewing. The margin of error is plus or minus three percent. But there are regional differences, and there is terrible insecurity in parts of the east and the south.  Do we know that the people pollsters had access to would be representative of the places they were into?

DUMMETT: Well, they do admit. I mean, obviously there are some parts of the country which they simply couldn’t get to. So while they did visit everyone of the provinces, they couldn’t get into all of the districts. They couldn’t get to some of the villages, which they wanted to because either of extreme Taliban presence or because of fighting. But they do say that they were able as far as possible to speak to a genuine sample of Afghans including those living under the control of the Taliban.

SHARP: That’s the BBC’s Mark Dummett in Kabul. Thanks very much.

DUMMETT: Thanks.

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