What are they thinking in Kandahar? We could tell you, but...

Word last night from Roland Paris at the University of Ottawa, with whom I recently travelled in Afghanistan and who sent an Access to Information request last April for public-opinion polling carried out by Canadian authorities in Afghanistan. Turns out the Canadian Forces have been asking a lot of questions to Kandaharis. And we can even see what the questions are. We just can’t see most of the answers. Here’s a web page with the .pdfs of the massively-redacted files Roland received, along with his letter of complaint to the Information Commissioner. Roland points out that the full results, if we could see them, would be at least as accurate a barometer of progress or its absence in Kandahar as the Defence department’s own quarterly reports on the situation there.