Why Are Afghans Smiling?
By Carol Graham and Jeremy Shapiro
WashPost
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Afghanistan has been at war more or less continuously for more than 30 years. The country has been invaded and effectively destroyed multiple times. With frequent reports of clashes and strife over the upcoming presidential election, most polls depict Afghans on the brink of an abyss and cite growing frustration with the violence, the United States and the international community. But research we conducted this year reveals that, relative to international norms, Afghans remain surprisingly happy. And unless we understand what makes Afghans so counterintuitively cheerful, we are unlikely to ultimately win their "hearts and minds."
A certain level of stability, of course, is necessary for society to function. While focusing on security alone may address the concerns of Western audiences, such a strategy is unlikely to please Afghans. After years of war, Afghans appear to have adapted to insecurity, as they have to crime and corruption. A sharper focus on reducing tolerance for corruption and improving public trust, based on an understanding of how those feelings vary across districts, might help foster the important glimmers of hope and preferences for political freedom that we found.
The surveys we conducted across eight regions of Afghanistan allowed us to gauge welfare under a variety of socioeconomic circumstances and to capture changes in mood as the nature of political and economic regimes changes. In collaboration with researchers in Kabul, we completed the first such survey in Afghanistan in January. We found an overall high level of happiness -- for example, 81 percent of Afghans said that they had smiled the day before. Smiling yesterday is a commonly used measure of innate happiness, and Afghans who were smiling in January are likely to have been smiling yesterday, too. And the reasons so many Afghans smiled were intriguing.
Adaptation to crime and corruption appears to be key. Of 2,000 respondents -- 11 percent of whom were women; fear of violence leads many women to avoid talking to unfamiliar men -- 25 percent reported having been a victim of corruption in the past 12 months, and 11 percent were victims of crime. Yet victims were no less happy than the average, as were those who reported being unable to walk safely in their neighborhoods. This is a marked departure from most other places in the world, where being victimized or afraid in one's own neighborhood causes unhappiness. As crime and corruption have become the norm, these phenomena do not appear to be having the usual effects on well-being. The ability to adapt to adversity is good from an individual perspective, but from a societal perspective, it can lead to complacency in the face of rampant crime and corruption.
(More here.)
WashPost
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Afghanistan has been at war more or less continuously for more than 30 years. The country has been invaded and effectively destroyed multiple times. With frequent reports of clashes and strife over the upcoming presidential election, most polls depict Afghans on the brink of an abyss and cite growing frustration with the violence, the United States and the international community. But research we conducted this year reveals that, relative to international norms, Afghans remain surprisingly happy. And unless we understand what makes Afghans so counterintuitively cheerful, we are unlikely to ultimately win their "hearts and minds."
A certain level of stability, of course, is necessary for society to function. While focusing on security alone may address the concerns of Western audiences, such a strategy is unlikely to please Afghans. After years of war, Afghans appear to have adapted to insecurity, as they have to crime and corruption. A sharper focus on reducing tolerance for corruption and improving public trust, based on an understanding of how those feelings vary across districts, might help foster the important glimmers of hope and preferences for political freedom that we found.
The surveys we conducted across eight regions of Afghanistan allowed us to gauge welfare under a variety of socioeconomic circumstances and to capture changes in mood as the nature of political and economic regimes changes. In collaboration with researchers in Kabul, we completed the first such survey in Afghanistan in January. We found an overall high level of happiness -- for example, 81 percent of Afghans said that they had smiled the day before. Smiling yesterday is a commonly used measure of innate happiness, and Afghans who were smiling in January are likely to have been smiling yesterday, too. And the reasons so many Afghans smiled were intriguing.
Adaptation to crime and corruption appears to be key. Of 2,000 respondents -- 11 percent of whom were women; fear of violence leads many women to avoid talking to unfamiliar men -- 25 percent reported having been a victim of corruption in the past 12 months, and 11 percent were victims of crime. Yet victims were no less happy than the average, as were those who reported being unable to walk safely in their neighborhoods. This is a marked departure from most other places in the world, where being victimized or afraid in one's own neighborhood causes unhappiness. As crime and corruption have become the norm, these phenomena do not appear to be having the usual effects on well-being. The ability to adapt to adversity is good from an individual perspective, but from a societal perspective, it can lead to complacency in the face of rampant crime and corruption.
(More here.)
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