JOHN YDSTIE, Host:
NPR's Mary Louise Kelly has more.
MARY LOUISE KELLY: Mike Boyer is senior editor of Foreign Policy magazine, which organized the survey along with the Center for American Progress, a Washington think-tank. Boyer points out the survey also reflects pessimism about the president's conduct of the war in Iraq.
MICHAEL BOYER: The main reason for this pessimism appears to be events on the ground in Iraq. Fifty three percent of the experts say that the surge of troops into Baghdad is having a negative impact on the war effort, an increase of 22 percentage points from just six months ago.
LOUISE KELLY: Again, that was 53 percent saying the surge is having a negative impact. Even among the experts who identify themselves as conservative, nearly two- thirds say the surge is either having no impact or making things worse. That could be read as a pretty stinging indictment of Bush administration policy. But Aaron Friedberg, who spent two years as deputy national security adviser to Vice President Cheney and who participated in the survey, says it's not so simple.
AARON FRIEDBERG: It's certainly not a ringing endorsement in the sense of giving A's across the board. But you always have to ask, what would be better and where would we be if we were pursuing policies very much different than those that we have been? It's possible that we would be better off in certain respects, but we might be worse off in others.
LOUISE KELLY: Another one of the experts polled, Georgetown University Professor Bruce Hoffman, says it's difficult not to read the poll as a repudiation of the administration's conduct of the war on terror. Hoffman just returned from a month in Southeast Asia.
BRUCE HOFFMAN: If you wanted to take the bumper sticker from both my experience and then from this poll is that where we're really being particularly either remiss or ineffectual is in fighting the al-Qaida brand as hard as we thought the actual al-Qaida terrorists.
LOUISE KELLY: Nowhere is the problem more acute than in Pakistan. The survey named Pakistan the country most likely to become the next al-Qaida stronghold, if it's not already. And 74 percent say Pakistan is the country most likely to transfer nuclear technology to terrorists in the near future, a terrifying prospect. The question is what to do about it.
CAROLINE WADHAMS: Everyone seemed to be pointing to how dire the situation was with Pakistan, but the experts were all over the map about what we do about it.
LOUISE KELLY: Mary Louise Kelly, NPR News, Washington.
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