Another Afghan poll
This one was done by the Asia Foundation for the US Agency for International Development (well, that will kill its credibility for some regardless of the Foundation's credibility). The results are rather similar to the recent Environics poll--but I guess that's just an imperialist conspiracy:
Afghans feel that the security situation in their country has deteriorated compared with last year but say life is better now than under Taliban rule, a U.S.-funded survey released Tuesday found.The survey is available here.
About 46 percent of more than 6,200 adults surveyed nationwide feel security is the biggest problem afflicting the country, while 29 percent think it is unemployment, according to the survey, which was conducted by the Asia Foundation and paid for by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
"In the 2006 survey, it was unemployment first, followed by security and corruption, and this time around it is security first followed by unemployment and poor economy. This further underlines the deterioration in security in the eyes of the common Afghans," the survey said.
Despite the rise in violence, about four in 10 responding to the survey said they felt the country was heading in the right direction [Environics said 51%]— roughly the same as in the 2006 survey. Half of those surveyed said they were more prosperous today than during Taliban rule in the late 1990s.
Afghanistan is experiencing its worst bout of violence since the Taliban were removed from power in a U.S.-led invasion in 2001. More than 5,200 people — mostly militants — have died in insurgency-related violence so far this year, according to an Associated Press count based on figures from Afghan and Western officials.
"Insecurity is the main reason for the people to believe that the country is headed in the wrong direction," the survey said.
While lack of security was the top-ranked national issue, those surveyed identified a lack of electricity and water, and unemployment as the main problems on a local level, the survey found.
The foundation said the survey was conducted in all 34 provinces and was the largest comprehensive opinion poll ever conducted in Afghanistan. Some 6,263 people aged 18 years and over were interviewed in person by a team of 494 trained interviewers between June 11 and June 22, 2007. The margin of error was 2.4 percentage points, it said.
"Almost half of the people of Afghanistan (49 percent) think that their families are more prosperous today than they were during the Taliban regime," the survey found. "However more that one-fourth of the people (28 percent) think they are less prosperous today."
Over 80 percent of the respondents said they have confidence in the Afghanistan's National Army and the country's troublesome police force [emphasis added--almost the same as in the Environics poll; one just hopes the results simply reflect accurate polling], while over half said they do not trust the formal justice system and would rather rely on traditional forms of justice — decisions by local councils — to settle their disputes.
About 80 percent of the people felt that cultivation of opium poppies was wrong, with 50 percent of these respondents citing religion as the reason, but only about 10 percent linked the trade to terrorism, insecurity and corruption in the country, it said...
posted by Mark, Ottawa at 4:05 p.m.
4 Comments:
I'm wondering how one carries out such a poll.
Dr Dawg: Perhaps you might go the the Asia Foundation and Environics sites and provide us with the answer as to how they did them.
Mark
Ottawa
I'm referring to how one could determine the sincerity of the answers during a civil war.
Sorry, I know this is ages after the fact, but I just wanted to respond to your comments about the CBC/Environics poll, which has raised concern among people who have worked in Afghanistan. I was on a trip to Afghanistan when it was released, hence this timelag.
If you're still interested, here are some points that I think bear some discussion on the poll's methodology:
Concerns with Validity -
Methodology involves entering people's homes and ask people's opinions on the military, especially the Afghan National Army/Afghan National Police. While the ANA/ANP are not quite like the militia in Iraq yet, they (esp the ANP) are very corrupt and often seen as dangerous to civilians.
Poll was conducted from September 17-24th, right at the beginning of the Holy month of Ramadan, which for many Muslims represents a period of charity and goodwill, and when the good that is done by fasting can be considered void is one speaks ill of others behind
their backs.
Afghans' oral culture and hospitable nature makes the linearity, aggressively
direct, and confinement of responses into five categories of intensity (highly agree, somewhat agree, etc) bewildering. My own direct attempts at conducting quantitative research in Afghanistan are written up here (Kish grid, audience research survey):
http://cms.mit.edu/research/theses/SarahKamal2005.pdf, pages 42-3, 81-3. The problems I've listed in my Master's thesis barely skim the surface of the research challenges I've continued to have while conducting my PhD.
I have spent 7 years working in and around Afghanistan as an academic, development practitioner, and "undercover Afghan." As a Dari-speaking Afghan-looking woman, I have tended to find that after you scratch the surface of Afghan discourse, something else comes out that could never adequately be captured in as blunt and culturally unfamiliar a tool as a western poll. I usually find that people from other cultures tend not to appreciate the underlying resentment or suspicion felt by many Muslims towards the powerful West, and how quickly it can bubble up over a quiet discussion over a cup of tea.
Finding a good facilitator for polling is hard in Afghanistan. ACSOR has done polls for organizations like the Asia Foundation (said, by US media in the 60's, to have been founded and supported via CIA funding) and the US state department, and their polls tend to have eyebrow raising results which run counter to other research but are advantageous for suggesting the military operations are running well. The Environics poll is not the first strange public opinion poll coming out of Afghanistan by ACSOR.
Sometimes the timing of the release of such polls is telling. I did a survey of publicly available public opinion in Afghanistan in Dec 2005, it is available here: http://c4o.unitycode.org/me/PeaceConditionalities.final.20060413.pdf . The studies that I looked at are listed in the appendix. Shortly after I finished this study (which found sharp pessimism and a downturn in public opinion), a new quantitative survey was released that claimed that Afghans were very pleased with the reconstruction process and international presence, released right before a major donor conference. This was in the same year that friends of mine were chased out of a UN compound in Jalalabad by angry mobs, who set fire to the compound. Also the same year as the Koran riots and Afghan Minister of Planning Bashardoost winning major public support in demanding that NGOs leave the country.
Methodology doesn't state how questions were piloted. Were there ways of triangulating responses? For instance, if people are so positive about the future, why is it that in the Environics poll only 40% think the government and foreigners will prevail in the current conflict? (20% believe the Taliban will win, 40% don't know). 20% believe Al Qaida is a positive force in the country - how does that mesh with other responses?
Concerns with generalizability -
Poor to non-existent communications and road infrastructure in rural areas, inadequate mapping, lack of security, illiteracy, widely divergent population estimates and shifting displaced populations hamper statistical generalizability of their poll.
--
I have been in Afghanistan many times in the last 6 years, and in my three visits this year I found the security situation to be the worst I have ever seen. I first entered Afghanistan during the time of the Taliban, and even then did not feel as threatened as I did in my most recent journey in October 2007. There is no sense of safety anywhere, and even longtime Afghan friends of mine now feel uncomfortable entering downtown Kabul. Such fears could only have worsened with the Nov 6th suicide bomb killing children and MPs in Baghlan, formerly considered a "safe" area.
I have been wrong more times than I can count when it comes to Afghanistan, which I find a fascinating and unendingly complicated space. I don't object to surprising research findings, but I do object to bad science that run counter to common sense. The Environics poll runs counter to what I and other longtime development workers have found to be the mood in the country (including a practitioner who has lived for 6 years in Kandahar). The poll is also dangerous, in my opinion, because the word for expressing the public's mood that is more and more being bandied about in expert circles, and among Afghans, is "occupation." I was a panelist at the Middle East Studies Association annual conference this weekend, and everybody there agreed with that framing. So I believe it is particularly important to not allow a poll (which, as we understand, even in the best of situations is just a poll and not reflective of anything other than what people choose to say to a pollster) to be taken as more than it is.
Best regards,
Sarah Kamal
2007 Trudeau Scholar
PhD Candidate, London School of Economics
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