A few hours ago I hosted the release of the Terror Free Tomorrow/New America Foundation public attitude survey of Pakistan. The whole event can be viewed here. The report is here.

The poll goes into depth in many areas, with some striking results: more than 50% of Pakistanis support negotiations with the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The United States is more feared as a threat to individual security than India. China is loved with an 82% favorable rating. Nawaz Sharif has an 86% approval rating. Musharraf is down to 23%.

Ken Ballen, president of Terror Free Tomorrow, summed up the findings well. View his comments here. Ken said the poll really strikes at the heart of three myths: that anti-American feelings do not matter; that we cannot change attitudes toward the U.S. anyway; and that they hate us for our freedoms. According to this polling, anti-americanism is driving political preferences, there are clear things the U.S. can do to improve our standing, and its the policies we pursue, not our passport, that piss people off.

When I add it up, I take it in a different direction. I believe you get a resounding repudiation of U.S. strategy towards Pakistan. That strategy has been to treat Pakistan as a central front on the war on terror. It's not hard to see why this has failed: the top issues for Pakistanis are restoring and independent judiciary, a free press, fair elections, and improving the Pakistani economy. But the U.S. has done little, if anything to support the lawyers rebellion calling for the reinstatement of the ousted judges, has poured billions of aid into not the economy but the military, and has stuck by Musharraf until the elections, while still not changing our policy. Worse, from Pakistani eyes, the U.S. is launching hellfire missile strikes and killing Pakistani civilians and military. Violence is at its highest leves in decades.

This, of course, gets to the core dysfunction of the Global War on Terror. You cannot win the war on terror on the cheap and violence only embeds the cycle of extremism. The fertilizer for extremism is economic and political exclusion and in Pakistan you have both at sustained high levels. Supporting the Pakistani Army with one hand while attacking the Taliban with armed Predators with the other just makes us complicit in the political exclusion and piles bloody grievances on top. For a president who made democracy the centerpiece of his second inaugural, it's hard to think of a place that would have benefitted more from real adherence to that speech.

The next president will have his work cut out for him. The honeymoon of the next president, in Pakistan, will be brief if it even exists. I continue to think that Afghanistan and Pakistan are part of a larger regional game that is more about Pakistan and India than a global vision of jihad. If, as was mentioned in today's event, Pakistan is keeping the Taliban around just in case the U.S. gets pushed out of Afghanistan and Pakistan needs to secure its western border from an India-friendly regime, the next president will find that the road to bin Laden may go through New Delhi and require a resolution to the real conflict, that over Kashmir.

First, however, Pakistan will need a stable, representative government. While the U.S. needs to be able to act against credible threats, what will be equally important is in supporting the kind of political reforms and economic growth that are high on the list of Pakistanis. Then, a strong Pakistan government can sit down to talk with India, cut a deal, and then start cleaning up the mess in its own backyard.