Polling of Afghans open to a lot of interpretation

It is comforting to know that I am not the only one questioning the Afghan poll. This is from the Harper Index. As a later post also shows the same company manages to produce polls in Iraq in which people are optimistic about their futures! It all begins to sound more and more suspicious and these pollsters begin to look as if they are wittingly or unwittingly part of a large psy-ops operation. It is a bit surprising to me that Environics and the CBC would get involved with such a group except perhaps they were sold a bill of goods. That at least is the most charitable interpretation. Perhaps they are out to sell someone else a bill of goods.


Polling of Afghans open to a lot of interpretation

Report of high approval rating of Canada among Afghanis contradicts poll last year that showed no awareness of Canada at all.

OTTAWA, October 22, 2007: Last week the CBC and Globe and Mail released an Environics poll that indicated overwhelming support for the Canadian mission in Afghanistan among that country's citizens. The poll was given high prominence by these news outlets and drove much of their news coverage last week, giving the government opportunity to promote the mission.

Closer scrutiny calls into question the poll's findings, bias, limitations and credibility. Corinne Allan is an Ottawa computer consultant who publishes the website yayaCanada.com. She points out that the poll "was actually conducted by the Afghanistan Centre for Social and Opinion Research, a Kabul-based subsidiary of the US survey company, D3 Systems, Inc."

D3 is a firm "two of whose researchers published a paper entitled 'Starting from Scratch: Making Research a Reality in Afghanistan' in late 2005, on the difficulties of conducting an accurate survey in Afghanistan." Their paper, she writes, discussed "the many obstacles still to be overcome, such as the low literacy rate and natural resistance to whole idea of being surveyed, resulting in a lot of non-responses - obviously making percentages a little dubious if people who would have responded negatively simply do not respond at all - and the fact that: 'the temptation is sometimes strong for an interviewer who has traveled several hours to a rural location and failed to complete many interviews to cheat and complete them on his or her own.' [italics added]

"And while the claim is that women interviewed the women, in fact it was so difficult to accomplish this that at one point the women interviewers quit en masse.

"Now, in 2007, the authors of that paper are still talking about those very same difficulties in a recent paper entitled 'Research in war zones: Methodology vs. practicality in Iraq and Afghanistan', yet they still manage to crank out what the US, and therefore also Stephen Harper, want to hear."

It is worth comparing the last week's poll with the poll conducted in Afghanistan last year by The Asia Foundation (below), which contradicts the Environics poll in several ways. According to that survey, for instance, no one in Afghanistan last year appeared to know Canada was involved there when asked in an unprompted way, unlike the new Environics poll. Eight other countries, including Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, were named on a list of nations offering development aid. Canada was not. In last week's Decima poll, only two percent of Afghans in the Kandahar area, where Canadian troops are based, were aware of Canada's presence.



Yesterday, in the Toronto Star, Thomas Walkom pointed out that last week's poll "did not find that a majority of Afghans want foreign troops to stay and fight. It did find that a majority of those polled approved of the 'presence of foreign countries' in Afghanistan."

On the main question of whether foreign troops should stay or go, Walkom observes that "Afghans are split down the middle with 52 per cent calling for a full withdrawal within five years versus 43 per cent who want NATO to stay until the Taliban are crushed."

He points to contradictions, including the nearly three-quarters opposition to the the Taliban and 74 per cent calling for negotiations with them. "And more than half say they want to be ruled by a coalition government that includes the Taliban."

As Walkom points out, recognition of Canada by those in the poll may have been merely polite. "When Afghans were asked specifically about Canada, most were delightfully complimentary. But first they had to be reminded we were there."