Abstract
"The war in Afghanistan has been unpopular in continental Europe for a long time" noticed The Observer in July 2009 when in April 2009 the Guardian reported: "Barack Obama today won agreement for substantial NATO troop reinforcements in Afghanistan, when nine European nations, including Britain, said they would send up to 5,000 troops and logistical help ahead of the presidential elections there in August".
Throughout the twentieth century the importance of public opinion was stressed by scholars and by some politicians when dealing with diplomatic and military decisions, however the importance of public opinion in civilian-military cooperation seems to have been overrated. Indeed the dichotomy between European public opinion and the decisions of the civilian-military actors regarding the war in Afghanistan questioned to what extent public opinion impacts civilian-military relations on strategic issues.
To define this role one can look at the context of public opinion's role on diplomatic and military issues as well as the general situation in Afghanistan, then one may consider the lack of support of European public opinion towards the conflict and finally briefly explain the reasons of the European governments' behaviors.
The concept of public opinion remains hard to define that is why some authors prefer to talk about public opinions, in this essay we will consider public opinion - according to Encyclopedia Britannica - as "an aggregate of the individual views, attitudes, and beliefs about a particular topic, expressed by a significant proportion of a community" measured by polls.
