What the Pakistani polls tell us

[varun]

After spending $10 billion on our frontline "ally", they still hate us.


http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/08/14/parsing_the_pakistan_polling

Parsing the Pakistan polling
Fri, 08/14/2009 - 12:40pm
Yesterday Pew released a poll of Pakistanis conducted between mid-May and mid-June that has good news and bad news for the United States.

The good news: The number of Pakistanis who have an unfavorable opinion of al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Osama bin Laden has jumped. Support for suicide bombings is still very low:

The bad news: They hate us. Okay, "hate" is too strong a word. But only 16 percent of Pakistanis have a favorable opinion of the United States. This is in keeping with trends over the last 7 years: the most love we've ever gotten from the Pakistani populace is a 27 percent favorability rating, in the spring of 2006 after the U.S. and U.S. donors pledged some $510 million in aid and in-kind military assistance to help with reconstruction and relief efforts for the October 2005 earthquake in Kashmir that killed 74,000 Pakistanis.

Another somewhat dispiriting figure is that, according to this survey, about half of Pakistanis view India as the greatest threat to Pakistan, while only a third see the Taliban as such. A big oversight, in my opinion, is that the United States wasn't an answer choice in that question -- a poll by Gallup and Al Jazeera done in late July found that 59 percent of Pakistanis think the U.S. is the biggest threat, followed by 18 percent for India and 11 percent for the Taliban.