Afghan war looms as election issue for Obama

Democrats and the Obama administration talk a lot about all of the problems they inherited from Bush administration policies. For most economic issues, Obama has taken a different direction from his predecessor; and won significant legislative victories that, while not appearing to help his current standing, could very well look better when he next campaigns in 2012.

On military and security issues, Obama has not deviated much from Bush policies. Instead, in Afghanistan he has increased troops. Voters are expressing the same ambivalence about Afghanistan as they showed toward wars in Iraq and Vietnam. They back the troops and hope for their success, fear failure and are not sure whether the war is worth its cost in human life and national resources. Democratic and independent voters are most skeptical about the Afghan War, making it a potentially huge electoral problem for Obama.

We conducted a Zogby Interactive poll of 2,389 voters from July 27-29 that asked about how the Afghan War is going and whether Obama should stick to his plan to begin troop withdrawals next year.

We asked how voters would "rate the success of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan in defeating the Taliban and strengthening the Afghan government" using a four-point scale. Just 19% overall gave positive marks of excellent (2%) or good (17%). One-third gave a poor grade. The largest response was the 44% choosing fair.

A plurality of 45% say Obama should carry through on his plan to begin troop withdrawal in 2011, with 35% saying he should not do so and 20% not sure.

To evaluate how these totals may impact elections, you need to break them down by party affiliation.

On military success so far in Afghanistan, 10% of independent voters chose excellent or good, less than half the totals for Democrats (23%) or Republicans (26%.) For any question involving an Obama policy, we usually find results where independents are somewhere between those of Democrats and Republicans. I suspect that if a Republican were presiding over the current military situation in Afghanistan, the percentage of Democrats rating operations positively would be even lower than what we found among independents.

On the question of troop withdrawal, liberals (85%) and Democrats (70%) were most likely to want it to begin next year. Least likely to want that were conservatives (13%) and Republicans (18%). Among independents, that total was 45%, smack in the middle of the Democratic and Republican poles.

Democrats and especially liberals want troops out of Afghanistan as soon as possible, but their response has been somewhat muted in deference to their president. There is already disappointment from liberals that Obama has not been as progressive as they had hoped, even though he succeeded where other Democratic presidents had failed on health care. Department of Defense and military officials are saying our commitment in Afghanistan will be long term. The number of U.S. troop deaths seems to hit a record with each succeeding month.

What happens if Obama does not begin troop withdrawals next year; or if the numbers who come home are so small it will look like a token attempt to keep a promise? At what point do liberals become more vocal about the war? It may be extreme to believe someone might challenge Obama from the left, as happened to LBJ during the Vietnam War; but it seems inevitable that war in Afghanistan will severely test Obama's relationship with his party's base.

Independents have a less complicated relationship with the president. They want results, and are quite dubious about how the war is going, as they are about Obama's handling of the economy. Obama has until November of 2012 to show them that both the economy and our military operations are going well enough to re-elect him.

On the Republican side, some doubt whether continuing the Afghan War under the current strategy is really in the nation's interest. That is a minority opinion that may cause some strains within the GOP, but is unlikely to produce a presidential candidate who wants to bring all of the troops home. If the war continues to go poorly, the Republican candidate will be able to criticize Obama's leadership.

In 2008 Barack Obama deftly managed concerns that he was too dovish by saying a reason for opposing the Iraq War was that it diverted resources from Afghanistan. Now he has put those resources into Afghanistan and is dealing with the consequences of that decision.

John Zogby is president and CEO of Zogby International and the author of The Way We'll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream. He writes a weekly column for Forbes.