CBS News 
 
 CBS News Poll analysis by the CBS News Polling Unit: Sarah Dutton, Jennifer De Pinto, Fred Backus and Anthony Salvanto. 
 
 Two weeks after an American soldier in Afghanistan allegedly went on a rampage killing 17 Afghan civilians, American confidence in the war is at an all-time low, a new CBS News/New York Times poll suggests. 
 
 According to the survey, conducted among 986 adults from March 21-25, just 23 percent of Americans believe the U.S. is doing the right thing by fighting in Afghanistan. That percentage - the lowest ever recorded by CBS News and the New York Times in this survey - is down from 36 percent in November 2011. Sixty-nine percent of Americans said the U.S. should not be involved in Afghanistan, the highest percentage of respondents who have said so since CBS News/New York Times started asking that question in 2009. 
 
 Only one in four Americans believes the war is going well for the U.S., the poll indicates, down from 48 percent last November. This percentage comes close to the question's all-time low, at 23 percent in November 2009, shortly before President Obama announced his plan for a surge of 30,000 troops in Afghanistan. 
 
 In recent months, a string of controversies involving U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan may have cast negative light on the ongoing conflict there: On March 11, an American Staff Sgt., Robert Bales, is accused of leaving his base in Southern Afghanistan to kill 17 Afghan civilians in what is being charged as a premeditated attack. In February, meanwhile, five U.S. troops stationed in Afghanistan were found to have inadvertently burned discarded copies of the Koran, which sparked days of protests there and resulted in several deaths of U.S. troops and others. 
 
 The CBS News/New York Times survey finds that just 27 percent of Americans think the war there has been mostly a success for the U.S., while 59 percent say it has not been. In September of 2011, 39 percent felt the war had mostly been a success for the United States. 
 
 More Republicans than Democrats seem to have positive feelings about the war in Afghanistan. Thirty-seven percent of Republicans said they thought the war had been mostly a success for the U.S., and 32 percent think the U.S. is doing the right thing by fighting there. 
 
 Among Democrats and independents, positivity on those questions is lower: Of Democrats, 24 percent said they thought the war had been mostly a success and 18 percent think the U.S. is doing the right thing. Twenty-three percent of independents thought the war had been mostly a success, and 22 percent said the U.S. is doing the right thing. 
 
 Last June, President Obama announced that he would be bringing 10,000 troops home from Afghanistan by the end of 2011, with another 23,000 leaving no later than September 2012. By 2014, he said, the mission's transition "from combat to support" would be complete. 
 
 CBS News 
 
 According to the CBS News/New York Times survey, many Americans would like to get troops home sooner. Forty-seven percent of Americans said they would like to see the timetable for the departure of U.S. troops moved up. Thirty-three percent think the schedule for withdrawal should remain as is, and 17 percent think the U.S. should stay in Afghanistan for as long as it takes. 
 
 Most Americans (55 percent) say they do not have a clear idea of what the U.S. is fighting for in Afghanistan now that Osama bin Laden is dead, while 42 percent say the opposite. In September of 2011, 50 percent of Americans said they had a clear picture of U.S. goals in Afghanistan and 43 percent said they did not. 
 
 Among those who said they did have a clear idea of what the U.S. is fighting for in Afghanistan, 35 percent cited combating terrorism, 16 percent said stabilizing the country, 12 percent pointed to preventing the Taliban from taking control, and 9 percent said oil and gas. 
 
 In a interview that aired Monday on "CBS This Morning," General John Allen, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, argued that the mission in Afghanistan remains "essential" and that Al Qaeda "remains a virulent organization" there. 
 
 "We don't want the Taliban to put down roots, or the al Qaeda to put down roots in Afghanistan that can facilitate Afghanistan becoming - once again - a launching pad for international terrorism," Allen told CBS' Charlie Rose. 
 
 He said that even in light of the recent tragedy, the U.S.-Afghan relationship was "not broken." 
 
 "I worry that the complications from these recent events can distract us from the larger strategic imperative of this campaign," Allen said. "We have seen that while the relationship may have been bruised in these events, the relationship has not been broken." 
 
 This poll was conducted by telephone from March 21-25, 2012 among 986 adults nationwide. Phone numbers were dialed from samples of both standard land-line and cell phones. The error due to sampling for results based on the entire sample could be plus or minus three percentage points. The error for subgroups may be higher. This poll release conforms to the Standards of Disclosure of the National Council on Public Polls. ||||| Republicans themselves are divided, however, over when to leave, with a plurality, 40 percent, saying the United States should withdraw earlier than the end of 2014, when under an agreement with the Afghan government all American troops are to be out of the country. 
 
 The poll comes as the White House is weighing options for speeding up troop withdrawals and in the wake of bad news from the battlefield, including accusations that a United States Army staff sergeant killed 17 Afghan civilians and violence set off by the burning last month of Korans by American troops. 
 
 The poll also follows a number of high-profile killings of American troops by their Afghan partners — a trend that the top American commander in Afghanistan suggested on Monday was likely to continue. 
 
 “It is a characteristic of this kind of warfare,” Gen. John R. Allen , the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, told reporters at a Pentagon news conference. He said that in a counterinsurgency conflict like the one in Afghanistan, where American forces are fighting insurgents while training Afghan security forces, “the enemy’s going to do all that they can to disrupt both the counterinsurgency operation, but also disrupt the integrity of the indigenous forces.” American commanders say that the Taliban have in some cases infiltrated Afghan security forces to attack Americans, but that most cases are a result of personal disputes between Afghans and their American trainers. 
 
 In follow-up interviews, a number of poll respondents said they were weary after more than a decade of war in Afghanistan, and impatient with the slow progress of Afghan security forces. “I think we should speed up when we’re bringing our troops home,” said Melisa Clemmons, 52, a Republican and a coordinator for a wireless carrier system from Summerville, S.C. “If we’ve been there as many years as we’ve been there, what’s another two years going to get us?” she asked, adding, “These Afghanistan people are turning around and shooting our people. Why is it taking this long for the Afghan troops to be policing themselves?” 
 
 Photo 
 
 Paul Fisher, 53, a Republican from Grapevine, Tex., who works in the pharmaceutical business, said the United States should no longer be involved in the war, although he opposed setting a specific timetable. “After a while enough is enough, and we need to get out and move on and let Afghanistan stand on its own merits,” he said. 
 
 Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 Peter Feaver of Duke University , who has long studied public opinion about war and worked in the administration of President George W. Bush , said that in his view there would be more support for the war if President Obama talked more about it. “He has not expended much political capital in defense of his policy,” Mr. Feaver said. “He doesn’t talk about winning in 2014; he talks about leaving in 2014. In a sense that protects him from an attack from the left, but I would think it has the pernicious effect of softening political support for the existing policy.” 
 
 The drop in support for the war among Republican poll respondents mirrors reassessments of the war among the party’s presidential candidates, traditionally more hawkish than Democrats. Newt Gingrich declared this month that it was time to leave Afghanistan, while Rick Santorum said that one option would be to withdraw even earlier than the Obama administration’s timeline. Mitt Romney has been more equivocal, although he said last summer that it was “time for us to bring our troops home as soon as we possibly can, as soon as our generals think it’s O.K.” 
 
 Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. 
 
 Michael E. O’Hanlon, a military expert at the Brookings Institution who is close to American commanders in Afghanistan, said that the opinion polls reflected a lack of awareness of the current policy, which calls for slowly turning over portions of the country to Afghan security forces, like the southern provinces, where American troops have tamped down the violence. 
 
 “I honestly believe if more people understood that there is a strategy and intended sequence of events with an end in sight, they would be tolerant,” Mr. O’Hanlon said. “The overall image of this war is of U.S. troops mired in quicksand and getting blown up and arbitrarily waiting until 2014 to come home. Of course you’d be against it.” 
 
 Among poll respondents, 44 percent said that the United States should withdraw sooner than 2014, while 33 percent said the administration should stick to the current timetable, 17 percent said the United States should stay as long as it would take to stabilize the current situation and 3 percent said the United States should withdraw now.
– American support for the war in Afghanistan has reached an all-time low, according to the latest New York Times/CBS poll. Some 69% of those polled believe the US shouldn't be fighting in Afghanistan, up from 53% just four months ago. Support has plunged among both Democrats and Republicans, with 68% of Democrats and 60% of Republicans saying the war is going somewhat or very badly, according to the poll, which is consistent with several other recent surveys. NATO plans to hand over security to Afghan forces by the end of 2014. But 47% of those polled want the US to leave the country ahead of schedule, and only 17% believe the US should stay for as long as it takes to stabilize the country. A military expert at the Brookings Institution blames the poll numbers on a lack of awareness of the US policy of slowly turning parts of the country over to Afghan forces. "The overall image of this war is of US troops mired in quicksand and getting blown up, and arbitrarily waiting until 2014 to come home," he says. "Of course you’d be against it."