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

December 22, 2005

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

A transcription of the Afghanistan Watch Exclusive's interview with Craig Charney

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.

Craig Charney is president of Charney Research, a New York polling firm. This was an interview with Craig Charney on Afghan Public Opinion based on his recent polling on Afghanistan for ABC News. Afghanistan Watch is prepared by Carl Robichaud, a program officer at The Century Foundation.

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