

The air war over Afghanistan has reached a post-invasion high. Unfortunately for the U.S., Afghan anger over air strikes is soaring as well.

No group of people is going to be enthusiastic about a foreign power dropping bombs on their countrymen, as the Pakistanis can attest. But a new poll from the Washington Post, ABC News and the BBC finds that 73 percent of Afghans say that U.S. air strikes are "unacceptable." That's an increase from the last survey, which found 66 percent opposition to the U.S. air war last December.

Back then, restrictions from General Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of the war, had all but stopped the air war entirely – and two-thirds of Afghans still disapproved of it. So NATO might have a statistical warning sign, now that its planes recently tallied 2,600 attack sorties between June and October, a 50 percent increase over the same period in 2009. In October 2010 alone, as Danger Room was the first to report, the U.S. launched more than 1,000 air strikes. That carries a risk of reviving the public anger over the air war that led McChrystal to tamp down the strikes in the first place.

But while disapproval of the strikes is almost back to January 2009's level of 77 percent, not all Afghans consider the U.S. solely responsible for the civilian casualties they can cause. While 35 percent of Afghans blame the U.S. for deaths from above, nearly as many, 32 percent, blamed insurgents for getting civilians caught in the crossfire. Another 32 percent said both were to blame.

As NATO has stepped up its air war under General David Petraeus, it's also claiming that "our incident rate of causing civilian casualties has actually decreased," as a NATO spokeswoman told Danger Room last month. NATO rarely announces a new air strike without including a boast that the Air Force's missiles hit precisely the intended insurgent target. But NATO's own statistics from October show a bump in civilians killed or wounded by coalition forces compared to those killed this time last year – even while insurgents wound or kill many more Afghans.

The new statistics indicate that Petraeus will continue to have a hard sell to Afghans if he keeps waging such an intense war. It's not just the air strikes. Special Operations Forces have stepped up their raids, against the wishes of President Hamid Karzai. Soldiers and Marines in the south are firing high-powered rockets at insurgent strongholds and rolling around in tanks to "awe and shock" their adversaries.

And justly or unjustly, Afghans don't see a lot of effort from NATO to protect them. A 39 percent plurality say NATO's gotten worse at preventing civilian casualties, with only 30 percent saying international troops have gotten better. If there's a bright spot there, it's that 43 percent said last year that the coalition's population-protection efforts had declined. And since recent studies have confirmed that civilian casualties lead to the creation of new adversaries, the new poll represents troubling signs for a war plan still predicated on keeping Afghans out of harm's way – whether on the ground or with help from above.

Photo: U.S. Air Force

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