|
|
Are civilian attitudes a useful predictor
of patterns of violence in civil wars? A prominent debate has
emerged among scholars and practitioners about the importance of
winning civilian `hearts and minds' for influencing their wartime
behavior. We argue that such efforts may have a dark side:
insurgents can use pro-counterinsurgent attitudes as cues to
select their targets and tactics. We conduct an original survey
experiment in 204 Afghan villages and establish a positive
association between pro-International Security Assistance Force
attitudes and future Taliban attacks. We extend our analysis to
14,606 non-surveyed villages and demonstrate that our measure of
civilian attitudes improves out-of-sample predictive performance
by 20-30% over a standard forecasting model. The results are
especially strong for Taliban attacks with improvised explosive
devices. These improvements in predictive power remain even after
adjusting for possible confounders, including past violence,
military bases, and development aid. |
Also, see the American Political Science Review
article that discusses the survey data used in this paper.
|