Afghanistan in 2015 1

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Afghanistan in 2015
1.2 AFGHANISTAN’S BIGGEST PROBLEMS: NATIONAL LEVEL
Key Question
Q-5A/B. In your view, what are the two biggest problems facing Afghanistan as a whole?
After assessing views on the overall direction of the country, the survey then asked an open-ended
question about the biggest problems facing the country at the national level. This open-ended question
resulted in 96 different problems cited, which were manually organized into the general categories
of security, economy, governance, and public services. The prevalence of security concerns is again
predominant:
• Security concerns: insecurity (42.7%), presence of Taliban (5.6%), suicide attacks (5.5%), drug
smuggling (2.6%), presence of ISIL/ISIS (2.7%), presence of warlords (2.5%), and crime (2.1%).
• Economic concerns: unemployment (22.4%), poor economy (13.1%), poverty (5.9%), and high
prices (3.6%).
• Governance concerns: corruption (24.3%), bad government (7.6%), injustice (4.1%), and tribal
issues (2.4%).
• Public service concers: education and literacy (5.8%) and scarcity of electricity (2.4%).
The most frequent responses constituting this “other” category include interference of Pakistan (5.5%)
and interference by foreign countries (5.2%). 3
Analysis of the individual responses to this question about national-level problems reveals the specific
issues of concern within the Afghan population. The seven most frequently cited answers to this question
in the 2015 survey are similar to the top responses in the 2014 survey (Fig. 1.9). and approaching the
highest rate recorded during the past decade (up from 45.8% in 2007). All other responses presented in
Fig. 1.9 show a decreasing trend over the past 10 years, with the exception of insecurity.