December 22, 2005

Afghanistan Watch: The Year in Review

This Week in Afghanistan:

• A Tumultuous Year in Review: The Highlights and Low Points of 2005
• Afghanistan Watch Exclusive: Interview With Craig Charney on Public Opinion
• Afghan Parliament Convenes in Historic—and Contentious—First Session
• U.S. to Cut 2,500 Troops in Afghanistan next year
• Telecom Privatization: Jobs vs. Efficiency
• Between PR and Propaganda: U.S. paid for media firm Afghans didn't want

“Parliament is going to open and the outside world is going to portray it as a triumph
when many Afghans see it as a failure of political will.”

—Sam Zia Zarifi, Human Rights Watch.

"Communists, mujahideen or Taliban, if they killed our people, they should be on trial…[They are] hiding under the flag of democracy, but they don't believe in it."

—Malalai Joya, a female representative, at the first parliament session

"The position of the warlord is much different than his previous position. Now he is the people's representative. According to the rules, there is no difference between him and me. Now we are equal…And today, or tomorrow, or maybe after a few months, he will learn that."

—Roshanak Wardak, a female representative of parliament

"I want people to pay attention to Afghanistan not just as a war zone,
but as a marketplace with opportunities."

—Jamil Noorzaie, an Afghan-American working to privatize Afghan Telecom

"One would prefer that he's captured somewhere outside Pakistan, by some other people.”

—Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf on Osama bin Laden.

Afghanistan: A Year of Peaks and Valleys
By Carl Robichaud

This year has been a turbulent one for Afghanistan, with both historic progress and daunting setbacks. The country’s convened an elected parliament for the first time since 1973, its first female governor took office, and economic growth remained strong. Afghans remain optimistic about their future: according to a recent ABC News poll, 77 percent of Afghans believe their country is headed in the right direction (versus only 30 percent of Americans who feel the same way about their country.) The majority of Afghans report better living conditions (85 percent) and improved freedom (80 percent) compared to the Taliban era.

Yet Afghanistan took steps backward in several sectors, and fulfilling these expectations will be difficult. As donor fatigue sets in, Afghanistan ’s window of opportunity may have closed another inch this year. Here’s a closer look at the best and worst moments of 2005.

Afghanistan Watch Exclusive: Interview With Craig Charney on Afghan Public Opinion

Carl Robichaud interviews Craig Charney, president of Charney Research. Charney’s firm, which implemented Afghanistan’s first national survey in 2004, conducted the most recent polling on Afghanistan for ABC News. Their findings, available online, offers some fascinating insights:

AW: What do you consider the biggest findings from this year's poll?  

Craig Charney: The continued progress in Afghanistan, despite the resurgence of Taliban attacks, is impressive. The fact that more than three-fourths of Afghans say that the country is headed in the right direction, that seven in ten have a positive view of President Hamid Karzai, and that two-thirds view the U.S. positively, is remarkable. The survey provides evidence of the gradual consolidation of democracy and the beginnings of economic recovery as well.

AW: When people hear about your research, they are often skeptical that it’s possible to obtain valid opinion data from countries where much of the population is illiterate, unfamiliar with polling, and living in hard-to-access areas. How robust is this data?  Given the logistical and security concerns, how did your team ensure that you got a representative sample?

Craig Charney: There are good local polling companies (supervised by experienced foreign pollsters) in Afghanistan. Although there is no census yet, there are good population estimates available from the UN food distribution program (as in Iraq), the Central Statistics Office, and a heads-of-households survey last year. Once districts and start points are randomly chosen, as in any other survey, our trained local interviewers follow a random walk procedure to ensure random selection of households. The interview force is half male and half female to ensure both sexes are interviewed. The one departure from practice elsewhere is that if a district is too violent another is randomly drawn from the same region and substituted, but this was only done in a handful of cases.  

AW: It seems that this year's poll is generally consistent with the findings of the poll you conducted last year (October of 2004). Are there any big changes or trends? Did any of the findings surprise you?

Craig Charney: There were relatively few changes—which was the news, as I mentioned above. The most striking difference was that the Taliban was seen as much more of a problem than a year earlier. However, interestingly, we did not see any increase in favorable attitudes to the Taliban—down to 6 percent (from 9 percent last year). So the issue involved in the return of Taliban activity, as an American military man has put it, is less a strong opposition than a weak state.  

AW: While most Afghans (83 percent) expressed favorable views of the U.S., almost one-third (30 percent) of Afghans responded that attacks on U.S. forces can be justified.  Among disaffected and socially conservative Afghans more than half (55 percent) could justify these attacks. The work of the U.S. also gets far lower marks than President Karzai, the United Nations, and the Afghan government. How do you explain these apparent discrepancies?

Craig Charney: In Afghanistan the U.S. gets favorable marks from two-thirds of the population—remarkable compared to its standing in most Muslim countries nowadays. The main reason is simple: 87 percent of Afghans approve of the US-led overthrow of the Taliban. The subsequent restoration of peace in most of the country and the beginnings of reconstruction also win praise. While 70 percent say that attacks on the US forces cannot be justified, we think that the 30 percent who do include both social conservatives opposed to the changes America has brought and those who are not hostile to America per se but think such attacks are the only redress available for abuses by U.S. troops in a country where legal institutions are weak and revenge attacks prevalent.

AW: One of your most interesting findings is on voter education efforts: they worked remarkably well. Did the poll offer insights into what specifically made them so effective?  Are these results replicable in other nascent democracies, such as Iraq?

Craig Charney: We found that the more Afghans were exposed to voter education efforts, the more supportive they were of key democratic values, like political tolerance. The key seems to be the amount of voter education people get. We had similar findings in our research on Indonesia, visible on the International Reports page on our website.

AW: Nine in 10 Afghans supported girls' education and women voting, and strong majorities support women working and holding office. Even though the poll shows that these views are not strongly held, the breadth of this support surprised me. Have these attitudes undergone a major shift or did the repression of women by the Taliban never have that much popular support?

Craig Charney: People who know Afghanistan in the days of the anti-Soviet jihad say that girls' schools were a favorite target of the mujahedeen twenty years ago. This is said to reflect widespread hostility to girls attending school. Attitudes to girls' schooling seem to have shifted since then, to judge not just by our results but the large proportions of girls going to schools since they reopened after the fall of the Taliban.   We have conducted research in other Muslim countries (Egypt and Morocco as well as Indonesia) that points in a similar direction, also available on our website.

AW: Almost half of Afghans (46 percent) believe that there was vote buying, intimidation, and cheating in the vote count, and yet three-quarters (77 percent) still have faith in the parliament. Can you dig into these dynamics a bit for us?

Craig Charney: It seems that they don't think that the corruption was on a scale large enough to invalidate the results. Corruption is an everyday phenomenon there, unfortunately. But there is an impressive degree of confidence that the electoral process itself was a fair one.  

AW: Despite reductions in opium poppy cultivation this year, the polling data suggests that over one-quarter (27 percent) of Afghans believe that opium cultivation is justified in certain cases. In the province of Nangahar, massive cuts in production (96 percent decrease from 2004) haven't been accompanied by changes in attitudes toward opium. What are the implications here? Are there any trends when these numbers are compared to last year's data?

Craig Charney: While 27 percent of Afghans think opium cultivation can be justified, the vast bulk of those (21 percent of the population) say this is only true if there is no alternative. Only 6 percent say it can be justified in any circumstances. The implication of these findings is obvious: most of the opium cultivators in Afghanistan would prefer to grow something else. This means there is tremendous scope open to alternative development programs if they offer a serious and attractive alternative.

AW: Does this data provide any clues as to specific steps the international community can take to improve its performance in Afghanistan?

Craig Charney: Afghans make clear that they want stable constitutional government, peace, an end to corruption, and the opportunity to prosper legitimately. The international community has important contributions to make in all these areas.

Rumsfeld says quick Afghanistan pullout risky
BAGRAM, Dec 22 (Reuters)—Addressing U.S. troops on the second day of a visit to Afghanistan , Rumsfeld said "there are some in Washington who are questioning why our country is fighting this difficult war on terror half a world away". Under pressure at home from Congress and from waning public support the U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, Rumsfeld on Monday ordered the number of troops in Afghanistan to be cut to about 16,500 by next spring from the current 19,000.

But he told the troops at Bagram air base "if we were to withdraw from Afghanistan precipitously, or from Iraq, the terrorists would attack us first somewhere else in this region and then they would attack us at home". . .

David Garner, an American adviser to the Ministry of Mines and Industries says that there are dangers in moving too quickly. He advocates a three-step process. First, the ministry must commercialize, finding out what a particular state-owned business does well and what staffing it needs. Second, the business must figure out how to make a profit. Then, once the state knows the value of what it has, it can privatize. "Let's say you have a coal mine that digs up 10,000 tons of coal a month," he says. "That operation may be sitting on a huge deposit, but the low output may make you say, 'Heck, we'll sell that for $1,000.' You may have given away mineral rights for a song."

Three Rifts Within the Parliament
KABUL , Dec 11 (NYT) by Carlotta Gall—There are several ways to think about the rifts within this Parliament. If one were to look for a principal division, it would be territorial, roughly between north and south—with the half a dozen ethnicities of the center and the north more or less united in competition against the largest single ethnic group, the Pashtuns, in the south and east.

If there is a primary ideological division, it is between those who fought the Soviets and those who collaborated with them or sat out that war in exile. Many commanders who resisted the Soviets and later the Taliban took on the roles of warlords in their districts, with their militias exerting control in the absence of a strong central government. Many amassed wealth and power virtually unchecked, as smuggling and poppy cultivation flourished. Now, many militias have been disarmed, with their leaders put in offices like police chief or governor. . .

A third division is between those formally allied with Karzai and those in opposition. . .In fact, the main opposition to Karzai is expected to center around three colorful characters: Muhammad Yunous Qanooni, a Tajik; Muhammad Mohaqeq, a Hazara Shiite, and Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, who did not run for Parliament but is the unrivalled leader of the Uzbeks and Turkmens and is expected to influence their representatives. Those three command an estimated 60 to 80 seats in the 249-member lower house. They are expected to stand together on matters involving the amount of services and representation their minorities get.

Karzai's fellow Pashtuns number 118, nearly half the house. But they are a varied group. Political analysts say that Karzai's true loyalists hold only about 65 seats.

The largest grouping is the 100 free agents aligned neither with Karzai nor the opposition. They include some 20 ex-Communists, as well as tribal and religious leaders, businessmen and many of the 68 women elected as representatives. For his economic agenda, Karzai may have to bargain hard with them as individuals.

U.S. paid for media firm Afghans didn't want
This article focuses on Rendon’s poor performance, but the real question is what does this sort of operation do for U.S. credibility? This sort of activity ought to come under increased scrutiny after recent revelations that the Pentagon has been paying to have sympathetic articles placed in the Iraqi press.

KABUL , Dec 13 (Chicago Tribune) by Kim Barker and Stephen J. Hedges—When The Rendon Group was hired to help Afghan President Hamid Karzai with media relations in early 2004, few thought it was a bad idea. Though Rendon's $1.4million bill seemed high for Afghanistan, the U.S. government was paying. Within seven months, however, Karzai was ready to get rid of Rendon. So was Zalmay Khalilzad, then the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and now the American envoy in Iraq, according to interviews, e-mails and memos obtained by the Tribune. The complaint: too much money for not enough work.

Despite such grumbling, The Rendon Group, based in Washington, managed to secure even more U.S.-funded work with Karzai's government, this time a $3.9 million contract funded by the Pentagon, to create a media team for Afghan anti-drug programs. . . Rendon departed Afghanistan in early October when its $3.9 million contract expired. But diplomatic sources said it is in line for another multimillion-dollar Afghan contract: a three-year deal to work on counternarcotics public relations. The company's work in Afghanistan is just a sliver of the more than $56 million the Pentagon has paid Rendon since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when it became one of the leading media consultants in the Bush administration's war on terrorism. It also is doing work for the Pentagon in Iraq.

Its performance, and the Defense Department's use of the company to shape its anti-terrorism message, has come under renewed scrutiny amid reports that the Bush administration hired Rendon to track foreign media and reporters and to help foreign governments shape their own anti-terrorism messages and images.

Advocates say Rendon helps fight propaganda from Islamic fundamentalists. Critics say the Pentagon's use of media firms such as Rendon blurs the line between public relations and propaganda. . .

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Afghanistan Watch is prepared by Carl Robichaud, a program officer at The Century Foundation.

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