AFGHANISTAN: Poll Finds Optimism, Amid Political Disenchantment

• by Matthew Berger (washington)
• Wednesday, October 28, 2009
• Inter Press Service

Only 29 percent of Afghans surveyed said they felt the country is heading in the wrong direction, marking an end to the steady increase in pessimism that had been evident over the survey's three previous years, when this number had risen from 21 to 32 percent.

Likewise, 42 percent said the country is moving in the right direction, a slight uptick in optimism from previous years. This figure had fallen from 44 to 38 percent between 2006 and 2008.

The survey, organised by The Asia Foundation with funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, polled 6,406 Afghans throughout the country. With the exception of 2005, the organisation has undertaken annual surveys assessing government, social and development issues in Afghanistan since 2004.

The year's survey took place from Jun. 17 to Jul. 6 and employed interns from Afghan universities as well as the Afghan Centre for Socio-Economic and Opinion Research to collect data in face-to-face interviews through the country's 34 provinces.

Care was taken to include nearly equal numbers of men and women respondents and data collectors could only be the same gender, ethnicity and from the same region as the interviewees, said Sunil Pillai, a programme officer in The Asia Foundation's Afghanistan office and a key overseer of the 2009 survey, at a Washington launch of the survey report Tuesday.

Each year's survey has also been conducted around the same time of year to ensure consistency and the comparability of the results, he said.

Though this means the data was collected prior to this year's controversial presidential election on Aug. 20, which many suspect has decreased Afghans' faith in their government, the report points to already low levels of voter confidence.

'They show less confidence in the likelihood of democracy delivering more tangible benefits such as less corruption or prosperity,' the report points out. 'Since 2006, there has been a steady fall in the proportion of respondents who say they are satisfied with the way democracy is working in Afghanistan.'

Seventy-six percent were satisfied with their country's democratic systems in 2006, while this number has been only 68 percent the past two years. Likewise, the number of those who are dissatisfied has risen from 21 to 28 percent over the same time period.

In a similar vein, 16 percent disagreed with the statement 'Democracy may have its problems, but it is better than any other form of government.'

And while three-quarters of respondents said they were likely or very likely to vote in the upcoming elections, only one-third actually did, according to an Oct. 21 report by the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.

The polling also occurred prior to the increase in violence that has taken place in the country since July. Yet on security concerns, opinion was mixed.

Forty-four percent mentioned security as one of the top reasons for optimism, thus continuing a trend that has seen this number rise from 31 percent in 2006.

Insecurity, however, remained the most frequently mentioned reason for pessimism, cited by 42 percent, though this is a decrease from the 50 percent of respondents that mentioned it last year.

Like people in any country, Afghans are fundamentally confused, said J. Alexander Thier, director for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Tuesday. 'People in Afghanistan are living a contradiction,' he said.

In other security-related questions, the survey found that 17 percent of interviewees reported they or someone in their families had been affected by crime or violence in the past year. This 17 percent reported that nine percent of the violence was at the hands of militias and insurgents and another nine percent at the hand of foreign forces.

The report says victimisation from military-type actions has risen steadily since 2007.

Unemployment is seen as the main cause of crime, being mentioned by 37 percent, while drugs come in last at 10 percent. There has also been an increase since last year in peoples' fear while traveling from one part of the country to another.

Around 70 percent of Afghans feel the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police need the help of foreign troops, about the same percentage as in 2008.

This comes as NATO's senior commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley A. McChrystal, has called for a significant increase in coalition troops in Afghanistan.

Thier pointed out the importance of knowing where Afghans stand before making decisions that affect them so directly. 'Sometimes in Washington people talk about 'what Afghans think or believe' and draw conclusions from that,' he said, emphasising the importance of surveys such as The Asia Foundation's.

While the number of respondents that said the ANP is honest or helpful has decreased from previous years, both the ANP and ANA enjoy higher levels of confidence than any other public institution, at 91 and 84 percent, respectively. This is consistent with the results of the surveys dating back to 2006.

'We hear anecdotally that people don't trust or that they feel threatened by the police, but the surveys have consistently said that people are confident in the police,' Thier pointed out Tuesday.

Police are local to the areas, so the people generally know them better and go to them for help before going elsewhere, said Pillai.

This is borne out by the statistics in the survey, which say both rural and urban Afghans are most likely to go to the police to report a crime, rather than to the army or to community, tribal or religious leaders.

Also, 54 percent of Afghans feel they are more prosperous than under Taliban rule, according to the report, as opposed to 39 percent in 2008. The same trend is seen in comparing Afghanistan to its days under Soviet occupation.

The report points to improvements in the quality of Afghans' diets, improved electricity supply and improved 'availability of products in the market' as the main factors that have influenced this upward shift in peoples' perception of a post-Taliban Afghanistan.

Afghans' expectations are highest when it comes to the future of education and drinking water availability.

Among the difficulties encountered in producing an accurate portrayal of national attitudes were the inaccessibility of some of the respondents the project had meant to include in its sample due to fighting or floods, said Pillai.

The Asia Foundation has said similar surveys are planned for 2010 and 2011.

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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