 This is our sixth national survey in Afghanistan, and you can see the dates. Again, area probability samples, random selection. As close as we can get to full national coverage, there are some difficulties, as you can imagine, in the toughest conflict areas. But we have had a consistent methodology and many consistent questions across this period. And this gives us something that we do lack in Yemen, which is consistent time trend to see the ups and downs of opinions as evasive unfolded in the country. I mentioned the sponsorship and the field work. 227 sampling points, stratified urban-rural, proportionate to population, to the district level. We did some oversampling in some specific provinces of interest. Any questions about methodology you can get to me with? There were some challenges. We had some non-coverage. 59 of the 398 districts were inaccessible for security reasons. And 75 were inaccessible to women interviewers. It wasn't safe for them to work there. That resulted in non-coverage of 10% of men and 21% of women across the national population. It's a challenge. You do the best you can. There were some replacement districts of the initially randomly drawn ones, therefore, and mainly because of security reasons. Nonetheless, we had a high contact rate overall in what we were able to achieve. And terrific cooperation. That would be the envy of any public opinion survey conducted in the United States, certainly. Okay. One reviewer of some of our surveys once said, well, they only interview people in cities. So I'd like to bring some slides. Important, too, to recognize and remember that when we discussed these data points, we're looking at numbers with percentage signs. But these are reflective of the views of individuals who gave us their time and their thoughts across the country. There are objective hazards in conducting these surveys. And I always would like to tip my hat to the interviewers who go out and do this work for us. They work for OXOR, the Afghan Center for Socioeconomic and Opinion Research in Kabul, the oldest survey research firm in the company founded by D3 Systems. These are some of the field reports that came back from the supervisors who went out in the field with the interviewing teams to conduct the work. It's remarkable the risks they take to bring these data back to us. Security is not the only challenge in Afghanistan. I haven't been there, but I understand that driving around is somewhat difficult, too. These are some field reports about the simply mobility in the country. And again, I put these up to tip my hat to the interviewers who go out there for us and do this work. My favorite was this. Interviewers were asked to note transportation issues. This is the report of one of our supervisors in Panjshir Province. It's kind of like the commute in New York, but worse. Okay, what have we found? It's an overview of recent trend. Just looking at our last two surveys in Afghanistan, our December 2009 survey found sharp improvements in public views, which were buoyed, I think, by political, economic, and military efforts. The election had been resolved peaceably. There was improved delivery in our data of development aid. The promise of the U.S. surge was present. There were perceived setbacks for the Taliban, which are wildly unpopular in Afghanistan, and a reduction in the attributed civilian casualties to Western forces, a critical element in support for the U.S. presence. In November 2010, this is when this survey was conducted, our data were very markedly different. Some dramatic changes for the negative. Retrenchment, given unmet expectations that followed the culmination of the election in Afghanistan. Views of the U.S. and its efforts all match previous lows or set new ones in our data. Why? Where the surge had focused, we found improvements in public attitudes, in helmet to a lesser and spotter extent, but also in Kandahar, but from exceedingly low levels to merely less low ones. The improvements there moreover were offset, more than offset elsewhere, where reports of instability or economic difficulties have grown in areas less focused on. It looked like a whack-a-mole. Taliban activity on the rise outside of the U.S. focus area. Got some external validation just recently. An internal reported, ABC reported that just last month police chief in Kunduz was killed by suicide bombers while he was walking on the street to show how safe his city was. If you look at our data from December 2009 to November 2010, the number of residents of Kunduz province who reported an increase, reported a strong Taliban presence in their Medi-dera went from 4% to 28%. Attitudes toward the U.S., you can see in that December 2009 survey, we saw a rebound in some of the ratings of the performance of the United States for some of the reasons I gave you, all those turned back south. You can see now how they've declined absent that 1209 poll in every survey we've done from extraordinarily high levels at the beginning, the support for the presence of the U.S. forces, positive ratings of their work, confidence in them to provide security favorable views of the U.S. overall. Let's not forget that at the time of the invasion of Afghanistan, the country was really sort of a perfect poster for U.S. popularity in an Arab world. We'd thrown out the widely despised Taliban. The United States had an 83% favorability rating in Afghanistan back in 2005. That's a recent survey of 43% in Ulo. Really some dramatic changes across time, and these trends I think tell us a lot about what's transpired in that country. There was an increase in 2009 in blame for the Taliban, for the violence occurring in the country, and a decrease in blame for the U.S. and NATO. That sadly reversed itself in our most recent survey, a decrease in blame for the Taliban, an increase in blame for the U.S. and NATO. And we'll see why as we note the increased reports of Taliban activity elsewhere in the country, the sort of like squeezing a balloon or a whack-a-mole, as I said. That's a blank slide. We asked people to rate the progress of the United States or some of the goals that were stated by President Obama a little over a year before we did this survey, about a year before we did it. Some progress was noted by significant majorities in some of the assignments of the U.S. and ISAF forces in the country. However, for all the effort expanded, the number of Afghans who see a great deal of progress towards some really pretty fundamental goals is quite a bit lower, as you can see. Improving economic development, merely two in ten Afghans say the United States has shown a great deal of progress toward that goal, preventing the Taliban from retaking control of the country. Again, two in ten see a great deal of progress. There's a positive in that these are all majority positive results, corruption being last on the list. But significant or the highest level progress is seen by precious few Afghans. After this long period and the high expectations that accompanied the start of the U.S. involvement in the country, I don't think this can be seen as much more than a disappointment. We ask another question of the performance or the change in the past year as the U.S. gotten better or worse. There's positive results and views of the extent to which the U.S. and NATO are training up indigenous forces. That's great. But on the rest, there's a problem, and particularly on the second to last, in terms of avoiding civilian casualties. We showed in our previous research, particularly in our 2008 and 2009 polls, a very strong and essential correlation between blame for civilian casualties and support for the presence of U.S. and NATO forces in this country. They're inextricably linked. And now we see in this data, increasing blame on Western forces for civilian casualties that informs many of the trend lines I just showed you. Support, therefore, here's a great example for the U.S. and NATO troops surge. Went from 61% when it was announced in our poll a year ago, December of 9, I should say, to 49% a year later. Concurrently, we saw a significant increase in support for attacks on U.S. forces, still a minority, but if 27% of the population, as Tony has noted, thinks it's okay or can be okay to attack U.S. forces that hardly makes you feel secure walking down the street. And indeed, another metric we had, rating the overall role of the United States and Afghanistan, tips negative for the first time in our data, two polls we didn't know nine compared to now, or compared to this past fall. Not only are ratings of the United States and NATO ISAF performance affected, but ratings within the country as well. President Karzai's rating, while still quite popular, and keep in mind what I said about Yemen and about the support for tribal leader, if you will, still takes a hit after soaring after he won the election. Or whatever. And some greater negativity there. Performance ratings, if we look at other institutions of government, an improvement for the police. And we saw the data about improved ratings of the training up of the police. But so the president, after a sharp increase, leveling or decline in performance ratings for the president, for the government overall and for the army as well. And a pretty significant drop in positive views of the country's direction overall. Still better than we've seen in many instances in the past, but a come down from that post-election reading the year earlier. Okay. The factors here that I've suggested some of them to you, violence, the Taliban, frustration with development. Across these metrics, in the course of the year, we don't see a significant decline in any of the fundamental irritants occurring in the country. Experience of violence, civilians killed, snipers, all these reports of violence are significant and essentially unchanged in some instances slightly worse. Reports of local Taliban activities across the country as a whole again have not subsided in any case and in more instances have increased. This is a decline in the percentage, the share of the population that says the Taliban has grown weaker in the country in the course of this year. It's not the direction most Afghans want to see taken. Indeed, if we look at these attitudes by support for the U.S. presence and the expectation of a personal, better life of optimism for the future, we see higher support for the U.S. presence among Afghans who say the Taliban need higher personal expectations. Similarly, and even more strongly, among those who say there is no Taliban present in their area, and those who report an absence of coalition bombing of civilian casualties are significantly more likely to support the presence of the United States and also to expect personal improvement in the year ahead. We can break this into conflict levels in provinces, the self-reported experience of violence in the provinces. We break it into high conflict provinces, those where conflict is lower but increasing in our data, those where it's low conflict are decreasing. And we can see that support for attacks on U.S. forces is dramatically higher and has increased overwhelmingly in this one-year period in provinces where conflict is high or increasing. And where conflict is lower or decreasing, although there is still this sentiment and it has increased, it's done so much more moderately. If we look at ratings of local conditions, there's been some flattening in many cases or declines in other cases in the availability of jobs and economic opportunities dramatically so in the rights of women and in freedom of movement which ties directly to these reports and activities I've been telling you about. We ask people to rate if these things are getting better or worse in their local area and we see increasingly negative ratings again compared to the previous year. Note especially the rating of the availability of jobs and economic opportunity, one of the fundamental building blocks of development in this country. I showed you that line on women's rights where individuals report no local activity by the Taliban, women's rights are rated quite positively by the population where there's moderate Taliban activity, we go 50-50 and there's a dramatic change where Taliban are most active. These data correlate quite nicely and you can see with the increased reports of Taliban activity we find across the country the deleterious effects on many living conditions, rights of women being one strong example. I've been giving you data about the country overall. We're going to look at some regional differences which Tony will tell you is the only thing that matters. These are the regions of the country as we've defined them for our analytical purposes. These slides will be up on the CSIS website and if there are any questions of course you can reach out to me. First the good news, attitudes for the United States in Helmand province, the focus of the search. It's been a broadly successful exercise, very dramatic, significant improvements in positive ratings of the performance of the United States, support for the United States, the presence of the United States, confidence, favorable views are all up in Helmand province. Now they're up to in some cases somewhat unprepossessing levels but they're up. If the mission was to improve things in Helmand these data indicate significant progress. Likewise less reports of Taliban fighting, less reports of support for the Taliban, fewer views that the Taliban have grown stronger, favorable reports of views of the Taliban are support for their presence. Again, across the board in these measures improvements in Helmand where the military was tasked with creating improvements, mission accomplished to some extent. Living conditions, even more dramatic improvements. Look at the change in positive ratings of local security in Helmand where we oversampled for the survey. In economic opportunity, freedom of movement, living conditions, dramatic improvements in Helmand. Improvements also in Kandahar. Now when we're doing this survey in November, more of the effort had been focused in Helmand. We saw more dramatic improvements. I think some of the changes in Kandahar were real and some were more anticipatory. But again improvements in Kandahar as well, another focus of the U.S. NATO ISAF efforts. A whack-a-mole effect when we look at the rest of the country. The Taliban squeezed out of Helmand and Kandahar into other regions of the country as I'm going to show you. There were increased reports of violence and Taliban activities outside of Helmand and Kandahar. Development projects seem to have slowed outside the areas of focus of the surge. And we may have some resentment in other provinces and districts where they see a great focus on Helmand and Kandahar, perhaps to the disadvantage of their own local communities and reports of deteriorating economic conditions. The average number of Taliban activities, if you look at the Southwest, the average number of reports of Taliban activities is dramatically down in the Southwest, but are flat in many other regions and are increased in the Central East and Northeast of the country. Confidence that the U.S. can provide security, one of the data points I just showed you, up in Helmand, up in Kandahar, significantly down in the rest of Afghanistan. And again support for the presence of U.S. forces, up in the Southwest, somewhat so in the Southeast, dramatically down in other areas of the country. Look at the Northwest, look at the Central and Northeast regions. These are all closely associated metrics. We look at living conditions, and there's a matrix of needs in Afghanistan, not just security, but living conditions as well. The average number of living conditions that are rated positively, improved in the Southeast and Southwest, particularly the Southeast, but deteriorating in the East and in the North, and in the Central and in the Northwest. If we look overall, we don't have enough data in some areas, I think we do in each of these provinces, each of these regions, we're looking at a regional level rather than a provincial level, improved reports of local conditions in Helmand, in the Central East and Southeast regions, flat in some others, but declined in the Northwest, in the North, Central and in the East. And this is why Tony is often so right when he says you cannot look simply at national data when you're disaggregated among groups and among geographical distribution, you learn more about what's occurring on the ground. If we look at Northwest Afghanistan, you saw the change there. That's dramatic decline in views, positive ratings of the rights of women in the region as we've seen this increased reports of Taliban activity, freedom of movement again, closely associated with the same phenomena, economic opportunity in others. The matrix of needs is different. It's not the same across regions. In the North, prices are a problem, but security from the Taliban, rights of women, there are some commonalities across regions as well as some differences. Central Afghanistan, again, security from violence, freedom of movement, security from the Taliban, all markedly down in this one year period. We look outside of Helmand and Kandahar and we see problems. In the East as well. So we predict support for the United States presence using a regression analysis to try to peel back the factors and see what are independently significant predictors of support for the United States efforts, holding all else equal in our regression analysis. These, and the R squared is decent, not perfect. That's an explanation of the variance. As we saw last year, and we see it again, blame for the U.S. and NATO for civilian casualties is the strongest single predictor of support for the presence of Western forces in Afghanistan, a negative predictor. Blame, on the other hand, on the Taliban for such violence, is a positive predictor, the second strongest and most positive predictor of support for the presence of U.S. and NATO forces. The presence of civilian deaths, negative, optimism, positive, ethnicity. Being a posture is a negative predictor of support for the U.S. presence. Local conditions, foreign aid and development efforts all independently positively predict support. Again, you can see as we've reported previously, there's no single silver bullet in terms of solving or addressing the challenges and problems in Afghanistan. It's about security. It's about violence and civilian casualties. It's also about local conditions, about aid, development, and matrix of needs. A couple of slides on governance and ways forward, and I'll take your questions. Official corruption remains a problem. I'm not sure why. It was less reported as a big problem in our most recent data set, significantly so than the previous one. I'd like to do more questioning around this. I've got some questions about it. One thing we did see improved reports of the performance of the police and the training of the police, which may be a locus of experience of corruption. There may be some progress here. I want to see more. Of course, the overall number, I mean, 85% say corruption is a problem, is still a very significant challenge to address, even though fewer in our most recent survey called it a big problem. Which of these is best able to create and enforce a system of rules and laws that Afghans want? The central government or tribal elders. This would support, there's a division there as you see, but there's been interest and efforts, I think, by the United States in reaching out not only to work through the central government, but to work through tribal elders in terms of some development and improvements in the country. And this shows a division in the view that that's the appropriate approach. There certainly is a path here to that approach as well as to working with the government itself. A more troubling result is does such a system currently exist in Afghanistan? And only four in ten adults in the country say it does. So there's significant needs there to win public's confidence that they have a government that reflects the wants and needs of the population. This is the same question we asked in Yemen. We see less support for the institution of democracy in Afghanistan than we see in Yemen, interestingly. And higher preference for an Islamic state. There's some moderate changes, but I wouldn't go too far with them. Nonetheless, even though on the right the satisfaction with the election outcome reached the majority, but hardly an overwhelming one, there is a significant expression of confidence that democracy can work in the country and that's a positive result. I mentioned previously about the Taliban and the consternation that we see in our data raised by the increased presence and activities of the Taliban across the country, outside of Helmand and Kandahar. This underscores how unpopular a result that is. We've never seen any more than, you know, most recent survey, 9% of Afghans are saying that they prefer to see the Taliban back in power. They are a very broadly unpopular group and remain so. We asked people what would be the possible reasons for others to support the Taliban, try to winnowing that out. There's been a suggestion in the discourse that the Taliban were better than the Afghan government in terms of delivering basic services and that may be a reason for public support for the group. We found at least in this measure, which is the best we can do to get at it, that that was actually last on the list in terms of the perceived reasons for supporting the Taliban. And far higher were religious reasons, corruption in the government and opposition in the presence of foreign forces, as well as threats. We continue to have a broad majority support for the U.S.-led ouster of the Taliban, although these many years later it's off its feet. What we do see is an increase in support for negotiations with the Taliban, the highest we've seen in measurement since 2007. However, we need to be cautious in evaluating what that means in a follow-up question. We asked if negotiations with the Taliban would be acceptable if they produced an outcome that seeds partial control of areas, Taliban-controlled areas to the Taliban, that would be broadly unpopular. So in other words, 65% said they would be willing to accept a negotiated agreement with the Taliban. However, only 37% said they would be willing to accept it if it seeds partial control. Challenging ways forward, difficult data from Afghanistan with success in these two specific regions more than offset by deterioration elsewhere. That's my presentation. I'll be happy now to take any questions or comments you have.