Zardari up, Nawaz down in US-backed group's poll
By SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT October 1, 2009
While President Asif Ali Zardari made some gains in his approval rating over the past six months, PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif's popularity suffered a little in the same period, according to a new poll published in The New York Times Thursday.
The survey, conducted by the Washington-based International Republican Institute (I.R.I.), a pro-democracy group financed by the U.S. government, also said that an overwhelming majority of Pakistani people continued to reject the United States as a partner to fight militancy in their country.
It said the anti-American trend persists even with the arrival of the Obama administration and the prospect of substantially increased US aid, posing problems for the U.S. efforts to tamp down Islamic militancy in this strategically vital nation.
"President Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of the slain former prime minister Benazir Bhutto and a relatively inexperienced politician, scored a 25 percent approval rating how he’s handling his job, 6 points more than in March," the Times Correspondent in Islamabad, Jane Perlez, wrote, citing the poll.
"His chief opponent, Nawaz Sharif, the leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-N, garnered a 67 percent favorable rating, down from 75 percent in March."
The findings come as Washington is poised to spend $1.5 billion in assistance for Pakistan in the coming year, a big jump in American funds intended to help strengthen the civilian government rather than the military.
The poll's release coincides with particularly strong attacks in the Pakistani media about the American Embassy’s hiring private security firms to protect American diplomats, the Times dispatch said.
"Even as the Obama administration takes pride in the new funds for Pakistan, the increased aid has been criticized in the Pakistani news media and among politicians as too little, one calling it 'peanuts'.”
Face-to-face interviews were conducted July 15 to Aug. 7 with 4,900 adults throughout Pakistan’s four provinces, excluding areas in the North-West Frontier Province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus one percentage point. The survey results will be available on the institute’s Web site, www.iri.org, on Friday. The I.R.I. has conducted surveys in Pakistan since 2002.
According to the poll, 80 percent of the respondents said they were opposed to United States assistance in Pakistan’s fight against terrorism, a 19 percentage-point increase since the last survey conducted by the institute in March.
The survey says that 76 percent of the respondents were opposed to Pakistan partnering with the United States on missile attacks against extremists by American drone aircraft. Such strikes have been under way for several years against militants from Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the tribal areas, and have recently intensified.
In order to improve American standing in Pakistan, the special envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, had ordered an overhaul of the public diplomacy programmes and was sending several seasoned diplomats to bolster the embassy, a senior American official told the Times.
A public affairs strategy centered on the American desire for a strong relationship with Pakistan and focused on describing the common enemy as Al Qaeda and the Taliban was about to begin, the official said.
The new effort included spending about $30 million on educational and cultural exchanges between Pakistan and the United States, and providing more Fulbright scholarships for Pakistanis to study at American universities.