When Afghans were asked in 2016 to rate their lives on a scale of zero to ten, they gave themselves a respectable 4.2, only a little below the median of 5.4 for 142 countries. By the summer of 2021 the score had plummeted to 2.3
Gallup spoke to a nationally representative sample of 2,002 Afghans between August 8th and September 29th last year, even as the Taliban was completing its takeover of the country. The pollster asked about people’s day-to-day well-being, just as it has done in previous years. Where possible, the researchers spoke in the privacy of people’s homes or at least discreetly out of earshot. The responses paint a grim picture of a population in despair.
Fully 75% of respondents said that there had been times in the past year when they did not have enough money for food, a slight rise from 2019 and a big jump from the 44% in 2016. Asked if women were treated with respect 67% of respondents replied “no”, up from more than half in 2019 and below 40% in 2016. Strikingly, the share of men who replied in the negative has jumped from 39% to 60% in two years.
Afghans are pessimistic about the future, too. When asked in 2016 and 2019, they imagined that life would improve within five years. In 2021 they expected the future to be worse. Less than a quarter thought that Afghanistan was a place where children could “learn and grow”, down from two-fifths in 2019. Unsurprisingly, half said they wanted to emigrate. Among young men the figure was two-thirds. In 2016 a third of respondents said their standard of living was improving.
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