A poll conducted for the BBC World Service and ABC News finds that while Afghans still think their country is on the right track, optimism about the future has fallen significantly in the past year.
From the BBC story:
... The poll shows that a majority of Afghans still believe that the country is heading in the right direction.
However, there has been a slump in confidence in southern provinces, where Nato forces have been involved in heavy clashes with Taleban fighters.
The poll - for ABC news in the US and the BBC World Service - surveyed just over 1,000 adults across Afghanistan.
Worrying trend
On the face of it, this survey appears to reveal a serious slump in confidence in Afghanistan in the past year.
The number of Afghans believing the country is heading in the right direction is down from 77% to 55%, those thinking security is better now than under the Taleban is down from 75% to 58%.
Those who are optimistic about their own future amount to 54%, down 13%.
The statistics are even gloomier in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, the scene of intense fighting between Nato and Taleban forces.
Now, only four out of 10 people there think things are heading in the right direction, barely half the figure of a year ago. Eighty percent rate their security as poor.
These trends, if they continue, will be worrying to the authorities in Kabul, Washington and London.
What I find odd about this Beeb story is it doesn't say who conducted the polling or when it was done. Nor is there a link to fuller details from the polling company.
Equally oddly, I couldn't find a matching ABC News story, but I did find one the AmNet did exactly one year ago (Dec. 7, 2005). In that poll, Charney Research was the pollster, with fieldwork from the Afghan Center for Social and Opinion Research (here's the methodological details).
Update
The ABC News story is now up. Here's the introductory paragraphs:
Five years after the fall of the Taliban, public optimism has declined sharply across Afghanistan, pushed by a host of fresh difficulties: Worsening security, rising concerns about a resurgent Taliban, troubled development efforts, widespread perceptions of corruption and reduced faith in the government's effectiveness in facing these challenges.
The U.S.-led invasion remains highly popular, the Taliban intensely unpopular, and the current Afghan government retains broad support. Yet this extensive ABC News/BBC World Service survey makes clear the country's profound problems, including renewed Taliban activities five years after the fall of their last redoubt, Kandahar, on Dec. 7, 2001:
Here's the .pdf of the full poll.