The Asia Foundation  A Survey of the Afghans 2012

Acknowledgements

This survey is the result of a collaborative effort among several institutions and individuals. It was produced under

the overall guidance of The Asia Foundation’s Afghanistan Country Representative Mark Kryzer, Deputy Country

Representative Abdullah Ahmadzai and Survey Project Manager Habibullah Haidari. Special thanks to Asia

Foundation Program Directors Mohammad Osman Tariq, Fazel Rabi Haqbeen and Palwasha Lena Kakar for their

contributions as principal authors of the survey. We also acknowledge the hard work of assistant authors Abdul

Ghafor Asheq, Fazel Rabi Wardak and Habibullah Haidari, and staff who helped in the technical work of all

chapters including Bezhan Abdali, Lima Kohestani, Khatera Azizpoor, Yar Mohammad Sameem, Khushal Qeam

and Abdul Khalil Qaney. ACSOR fielded the survey enumerators. Sudhindra Sharma and Pawan Kumar Sen from

Inter Disciplinary Analysts (IDA) provided analytical support and guidance. Nancy Hopkins, an Asia Foundation

consultant, served as editor for the survey. Foundation staff from San Francisco and Washington, DC provided

critical support as well.

The Asia Foundation would like to thank the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Foreign

and Commonwealth Office/Department for International Development (FCO/DFID), Australian Agency for

International Development (AusAID) and German Foreign Affairs Ministry for making this important research and

capacity-building tool possible.

Nearly nine in 10 respondents (87%) agree that women and men should have equal educational opportunities,

including 48% who strongly agree. Two thirds of Afghans surveyed say they think women should be allowed

to work outside the home. Survey findings reveal a substantial difference between men and women’s attitudes

in this regard. Four fifths of female respondents (80%) say women should be allowed to work outside

the home compared to just over half (55%) of men who say so. Significantly more urban respondents agree

(81%) than their rural counterparts (61%).

on democracy

Eighty percent of respondents agree that the government should allow peaceful opposition, and 83% agree

that everyone should have equal rights under law, regardless of gender, ethnicity or religion.

When asked an open-ended question about what personal benefits they believe they will gain from democracy

in Afghanistan, 30% said peace, 29% said freedom and 20% said good security. Other popular responses were

rights and law (15%), Islamic democracy (14%), less corruption (13%), a government of the people (12%)

and more job opportunities (12%).

A majority of respondents (58%) say they think the 2010 parliamentary elections were free and fair, while

more than one third (37%) say they were not. There is large difference between rural and urban respondents;

sixty-one percent of rural respondents say that the past parliamentary elections were free and fair, while just

under half of urban respondents (45%) say they were.

Just over half of respondents (52%) say Afghanistan is moving in the right direction, up from 46% in 2011.  People surveyed identify insecurity (including attacks, violence, and terrorism) (28%), unemployment (27%)

and corruption (25%) as the three biggest problems facing Afghanistan as a whole.

Three quarters (75%) of respondents give central government performance a positive assessment, including

15% who say it is doing a very good job and 60% who say it is doing a somewhat good job. Over time,

an increasing number of people report satisfaction with the way the central government is carrying out its

responsibilities. In several substantive areas, Afghans’ positive assessment of government performance is at

its highest point since 2010, including in education (89%), security provision (70%) and maintaining relations

with neighboring countries (55%).

The most commonly cited reasons for optimism are good security (41%) and reconstruction/rebuilding

(35%), followed by the opening of schools for girls (14%), improvement in the education system (13%), and

having an active Afghan National Army (ANA) and Afghan National Police (ANP) (13%). Insecurity (39%)

is the most commonly cited reason for pessimism. Security thus remains the most significant factor in shaping

Afghans’ assessment of progress in the country.

Survey findings show that Afghans’ support for peace and reconciliation remain very high in 2012, as it has

been in previous years. A large majority of respondents (81%) agree with the government’s national reconciliation

and negotiation efforts, with 38% strongly in favor. Although majority within all ethnic groups are in

favor of the government’s reconciliation efforts and negotiation with the armed opposition, a relatively higher

number of Pashtuns (85%) and Uzbeks (84%) are supportive of this endeavor. Support is relatively higher in

the East (91%), North East (86%) and South West (84%).

A majority of respondents say they have no sympathy at all (63%) with armed opposition groups in Afghanistan,

while 10% say they have a lot of sympathy and 20% say they have some level of sympathy. Over time,

there has been a decline in the number of people who sympathize (either a lot or little) with these armed

opposition groups that use violence. While the 2012 figures are fairly similar to 2011, there has been a noticeable

decline from 2011 to 2012 in the proportion of Afghans with no sympathy for armed opposition groups

in a few regions, including Central/Kabul (74% to 70%), the West (60% to 56%) and the South West (61%

to 55%). Among those who express a high level of sympathy toward the armed opposition groups, 34% say

it is because these groups are Afghans, while a similar proportion (33%) says it is because they are Muslims.

Over half of respondents (53%) reported that their families are more prosperous today than they were during

the Taliban era. Fewer than one third (31%) say they are less prosperous. A higher proportion of urban residents

(66%) than rural residents (49%) report that their families are more prosperous today, and more rural

residents (34%) than urban residents (22%) say that they are less prosperous.

Half of all respondents (50%) say their household financial wellbeing has improved during the past year, and half

(51%) say that access to schools has improved. When asked about their household health and quality of their

diet, roughly equal percentages say they have improved (42% and 41%, respectively) or stayed the same (46% for

each). More than half of respondents (51%) say the availability of products in the market and the condition of

their house/dwelling has stayed the same, and 14% say it is worse. Sizeable numbers of Afghans report that their

electricity supply (32%) and employment opportunities (28%) have gotten worse over the past year.

More than two thirds (70%) of respondents say the employment situation in their local area is quite bad or

very bad, suggesting that the government’s efforts to improve job availability have not yet borne fruit. Sixtytwo

percent are dissatisfied with the supply of electricity in their local area. At the same time, more than three

quarters of respondents (77%) report that availability of education is quite good or very good in their local

area, followed by clean drinking water (76%), the security situation (74%) and freedom of movement (72%).

Comparison of 2007 to 2012 data shows that, with the exception of the availability of jobs, the availability

of the rest of the services has generally improved since 2007/2008, with some fluctuation in between. The

greatest perceived improvement has been in the area of clean drinking water, for which satisfaction rose 14

percentage points from 2008 to 2012.

More than half of those surveyed are aware of development projects related to education (53%) and reconstruction/

building of roads and bridges (50%). Afghans have also noticed projects to improve the drinking

water supply (43%), deliver healthcare (38%), build mosques (29%) and improve the electricity supply (22%).

Generally, awareness about development projects is higher in the East, South West and South East than in the

Central/Hazarajat, Central/Kabul and North East regions.

Among those who indicated awareness of such development projects, more than one third (35%) say the

United States has provided the most aid in their local area. Respondents also identified Germany (9%), Japan

(9%), Australia (5%), India (4%), Turkey (3%), and Sweden (3%), and other aid providers to a lesser degree.

Germany was identified by a relatively higher proportion of people in the North East (30%), and a relatively

high proportion of respondents in the Central/Hazarajat (21%) and East (15%) regions identified Japan. Australia

was named by a higher proportion of people in the Central/Hazarajat (10%) and Central/Kabul (8%)

regions. India was more frequently identified in the East (7%), South West (7%) and South East (6%). The

United Kingdom was identified most often in the South West (6%), but named infrequently in other regions.

Likewise, 10% of respondents in the South West identify Canada as a major aid provider.

Three quarters (75%) of respondents give central government performance a positive assessment, including

15% who say it is doing a very good job and 60% who say it is doing a somewhat good job. Over time,

an increasing number of people report satisfaction with the way the central government is carrying out its

responsibilities. In several substantive areas, Afghans’ positive assessment of government performance is at

its highest point since 2010, including in education (89%), security provision (70%) and maintaining relations

with neighboring countries (55%).

The most frequently cited achievements of central government are a better education system (28%), establishing

peace and security (24%) and reconstruction (21%), with some variation across regions.

The most frequently reported failings of central government are administrative corruption (32%), insecurity

(23%) and lack of job opportunities (18%). Twelve percent of respondents identified suicide attacks, followed

by weak government (9%), failure to remove the Taliban (8%), a weak economy (8%), removing drugs (7%),

a bad education system (5%) and injustice (5%).

Afghanistan in 2012 9

This year, respondents identify a more diverse range of reasons for why freedom of expression has improved.

Half (50%) attribute it to good security conditions in their area, more than one third (39%) say it is due to

the legal guarantee of freedom of speech, and 13% attribute it to peace and democracy and the presence of

the ANP and ANA. Smaller percentages identified good government, unity among people, better education,

removal of the Taliban, freedom of the press and respect for human rights as reasons why people now feel

safer expressing their opinions.

More than half (52%) of respondents say they feel they can influence government decisions by participating

in political processes, including 14% who say they can have a lot of influence and 38% who say they can have

some influence. However, 24% feel that they have no influence at all.

Almost one third of respondents (29%) identify lack of education and/or illiteracy as the biggest problem

faced by women. Ten percent cite the lack of rights/women’s rights, 8% say domestic violence, 6% say forced

marriage/dowry, 5% say general healthcare and 4% say poverty. Since 2006, lack of education and illiteracy

have consistently been identified as the biggest problem for women in Afghanistan, these figures have been

stable since 2007 (29% in 2007, 28% in 2008, 30% in 2009, 31% in 2010 and 25% in 2011) with a small drop

in 2011 and rose back in 2012.

Drones, Statistics, Pakistan and Yemen

 Peter Bergen, Director of the National Security Studies Program

April 23, 2013 

Testimony presented before the U.S. Senate 

The drop in the number of civilian and unknown casualties in Pakistan since 2009 came as a result of several developments, one of which was a directive issued from the White House just days after President Obama took office tightening up the way the CIA selected targets and carried out strikes. Specifically, Obama wanted to evaluate and personally sign off on any strike if the agency did not have a "near certainty" that it would result in zero civilian casualties. 

The CIA also began utilizing smaller munitions for more pinpoint strikes.16

Also drones can now linger for longer periods of time over targets—ascertaining whether civilians are around the target area—than was the case several years ago. 

Additionally, the drone program has come under increasing congressional oversight in the past couple of years, a layer of accountability that one former CIA official said was unheard of when he left the agency in 2009.17

Since early 2010, members of the Senate and House intelligence committees have held monthly meetings at CIA headquarters to watch video recordings of specific drone strikes, as well as to review the intelligence upon which CIA agents on the ground in Pakistan based their target selection. 

According to data generated by the New America Foundation, by averaging the high and low casualty estimates of militant and non-militant deaths published in a wide range of reliable media outlets, the estimated civilian death rate in U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan has declined dramatically since 2006, when—due to two large-scale strikes—it was almost 100%. 

U.S. government officials have asserted that the civilian casualty rate is zero. And it has been reported that the Obama administration considers any military-age male in the strike target area as a "militant".10 The New America data is not based on the U.S. official definition of a militant and does not rely on any U.S. official counting of the strikes. Rather, New America records as a militant only those people identified in credible news reports as a militant or a “suspected militant.” The media outlets used by New America in its database of drone strikes are the Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France Presse; The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal; the British newspapers The Telegraph and The Guardian; and the Pakistani news outlets The Express Tribune, Dawn, The Daily Times, Geo TV, and The News; as well as the BBC and CNN. The majority of these sources get information on CIA drone strikes in Pakistan from Pakistani intelligence, security, and local government officials, as well as local villagers. 

The New America Foundation’s casualty counts also differentiate between individuals identified as “militants” and those identified as “civilians.” The murkiness of some reporting in the tribal regions of Pakistan and in Yemen led New America researchers to designate another category for “unknown” casualties. If two or more media reports refer to those killed as militants, they are labeled as militants in the New America data. Similarly, if two or more media reports refer to those killed as civilians, they go under the civilian column in the New America database. And if the different media reports on a single strike are so contradictory that researchers do not feel comfortable placing either label on those killed, they are listed as “unknown.”11 

Over the life of the drone program in Pakistan, the estimated non-militant (civilian and unknown) death rate is 20 percent according to the New America data. Under President Bush, it was about 47 percent while under President Obama it has been about 16 percent. In 2012, the proportion of total civilians (2 percent) and unknowns (9 percent) killed was 11 percent. The New America data shows that between 454 and 637 non-militant (civilian and unknown) individuals were killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan between 2004 and mid-April 2013. New America estimates that the confirmed number of Pakistani civilians who have been killed by drone strikes during the same time frames is between 258 to 307, or 10.6 percent of the total number of casualties. 

The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) and the D.C.-based Long War Journal also maintain counts of drone casualties in Pakistan. BIJ reports that between 411 and 884 Pakistani civilians have been killed in U.S. drone strikes, representing 16 to 25 percent of the total casualties BIJ has counted. On the low end, the Long War Journal reports that 153 Pakistani civilians have been killed, representing just 5.8 percent of the 2,660 deaths it has recorded over the life of the drone campaign. 

All three databases report relatively low civilian casualty figures for 2012: New America reported 5 (as well as 23 to 29 unknowns), BIJ reported 7 to 42 civilian deaths, and the Long War Journal reported 4. 

In March 2013, following a visit to Pakistan, Ben Emmerson, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, emailed the Associated Press that the Pakistani government had told him it had confirmed at least 400 civilian deaths by U.S. drones. This number is in the range of the low estimate of 411 civilian deaths by the BIJ and also computes with the New America figures estimating between 258 and 307 civilians and a further 196 to 330 unknowns have been killed. 

However, Pakistani security officials acknowledged during background interviews with the Washington Post in mid-2010 that, in fact, better technology, a deeper network of on-the-ground informants, and better coordination between U.S. and Pakistani intelligence officials had all contributed to a significant drop in civilian deaths in drone strikes.14

And Major General Ghayur Mahmood, a commander of Pakistani troops in North Waziristan where the majority of drone strikes take place, conceded publicly in March 2011 that "myths and rumors about U.S. Predator strikes and the casualty figures are many, but it's a reality that many of those killed in these strikes are hardcore elements, a sizeable number of them foreigners."15 The general went on to say that drone strikes had killed some one thousand militants in North Waziristan. 

=

Early in his administration, President Obama took it upon himself to act as the chief decision-maker on whether individuals were added to the U.S. drone “kill list” or not. He would reportedly gather with a small group of his top national security advisors every Tuesday to pour over intelligence gathered on suggested new targets, “determined to keep the tether [on the drone program] pretty short,” according to National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon.7 It was reported in October 2012 that the administration had been working for at least two years on a secret “disposition matrix” to replace the “kill list.” With the matrix, officials sought to lay out all of the U.S. resources being used to track down and build a case against terrorist suspects who may be either in the reach of drones or outside established drone theaters.8 

Geographically speaking, of all the U.S. drone strikes reported in Pakistan’s tribal regions, over 70 percent have struck North Waziristan, home to factions of the Pakistani Taliban and the Haqqani Network, which has often launched operations in Kabul against civilian targets. 

The year 2010, with a record 122 strikes in Pakistan, marked the most intense period of the Obama drone campaign in Pakistan. This, combined with the May 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad and the killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers in a NATO air strike in November 2011, severely damaged the relationship between the United States and Pakistan and resulted in the eviction of CIA-controlled drones from Shamsi Air Base in Baluchistan.3 At the same time, Cameron Munter, the then-U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan, was urging that there be more judicious targeting of the drone strikes as well as increased consultation with the Pakistanis about them.4 

Some combination of U.S. Department of State pushback, increased congressional oversight, the closure of the CIA drone base in Pakistan (and, perhaps, a declining number of targets in the tribal regions), and a greater desire to heed Pakistani sensitivities about drone attacks led to a sharp fall in the number of strikes in 2011. The number of drone strikes in Pakistan in 2011 fell by 40 percent from the record number of strikes in 2010. 

5. The Impact of Drones on Militant Groups 

Osama bin Laden himself recognized the devastation that the drones were inflicting on his organization, writing a lengthy memo about the issue that was later recovered in the Abbottabad compound where he was killed. In the October 2010 memo to a lieutenant, bin Laden advised his men to leave the Pakistani tribal regions, where the drone strikes have been overwhelmingly concentrated, and head to a remote part of Afghanistan. He also suggested that his son Hamza decamp for the tiny, rich Persian Gulf kingdom of Qatar.18 

Evidence of the drone strikes' impact can be found in the description provided by David Rohde, the former New York Times reporter held by the Taliban Haqqani Network for months in 2009, who called the drones "a terrifying presence" in South Waziristan. Key Taliban commanders reportedly started sleeping outside under trees to avoid being targeted and regularly executed suspected "spies" accused of providing information to the United States, suggesting they feared betrayal from within. 

The drone attacks in Pakistan have undoubtedly hindered some of the Taliban's operations and killed hundreds of their lower-level fighters and a number of their top commanders. Conversely, the CIA strikes may also be fueling terrorism. Faisal Shahzad, an American citizen of Pakistani descent trained by the Pakistani Taliban, tried to detonate a car bomb in Times Square on May 1, 2010. The plot failed, but Shahzad subsequently claimed that the drone program had fueled his anger against the United States. 

The CIA inaugurated the lethal drone program in Yemen on November 3, 2002, with a Hellfire missile launched from a Predator drone at a vehicle in the province of Maarib, about 100 miles east of the capital city of Sana’a. The attack killed al-Qaeda's top operative in Yemen, Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, who was also a suspect in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole off the Yemeni coast. In the car with al-Harethi were five other militants, all of whom were killed, including U.S. citizen Kamal Derwish. He was the first reported American casualty in the CIA's drone campaign. After the 2002 U.S. drone strike, there were no reported U.S. air or drone strikes in Yemen until December 2009, when a sustained campaign of attacks began. That change came when al-Qaeda's Yemen-based affiliate, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), attempted a number of terrorist attacks against the United States. 

As of mid-April 2013, U.S. air and drone strikes had killed an estimated 427 to 679 people in Yemen, 439 to 583 of whom were identified in media reports as militants, according to the New America Foundation's data.22 That data is derived from reports in the Associated Press, Reuters, CNN, and the Yemen Post. Of these deaths, all but six occurred during Obama's presidency. The non-militant casualty rate from these strikes is estimated to be between 7 percent and 14 percent, roughly comparable with the civilian and unknown casualty rate from the U.S. drone program in Pakistan, which averaged 11 percent in 2012, according to New America Foundation data. 

During the Obama administration, U.S. drones have killed at least 34 key al-Qaeda militants in Yemen, including the Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and Fahd al-Quso, who was suspected of involvement in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole.24 The death of AQAP’s senior leader Said al-Shihri from wounds sustained in a U.S. drone strike in October 2012 dealt the organization an important blow.25 (A list of the AQAP leaders who have been killed by drones can be found in Appendix C). AQAP hasn’t attempted a plot against a Western target since its attempt to bring down US-bound cargo planes in October 2010, and the group has lost control of the string of towns in southern Yemen it held in 2011. 

Unlike Pakistan, where political leaders have almost universally—at least in public—condemned the strikes, Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi said during an interview with the Washington Post in September 2012 that he personally signs off on all U.S. drone strikes in Yemen and that they hit their targets accurately, asserting, "The drone technologically is more advanced than the human brain."