"Your Excellency, suppose you were an international politics student and were questioned by a professor on how to define the Taliban, how would you answer him?"

This was just one of many questions raised by audience members following a recent lecture by former Afghanistan president H.E. Hamid Karzai, who was invited by the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (SIIS) to speak on Afghanistan and its prospects for peace and prosperity.

In March of 2015, US President Barrack Obama announced that the US will postpone its planned withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan. Statistics from the US-based think tank Institute for the Study of War show that nearly 30 percent of areas in Afghanistan are controlled or greatly influenced by the Taliban.

In his speech, Karzai criticized the way that the US had countered terrorism in Afghanistan since the September 11 attacks in 2001. "After 14 years, the questions asked today should be: are Afghanistan and the region more secure or less secure? And, is there more extremism or less extremism among Afghans now?"

Responding to the audience member's question, Karzai said the way that the US had dealt with the Taliban was "a 100 percent mistake."

Karzai said he expects to see more countries, including China, participate in improving the current situation in Afghanistan. "When I was president one of my pursuits was to get China involved deeply in the resolution of the Afghanistan situation, and also involved regionally and internationally in the war against extremism and terrorism."

 "So we are happy to see that India, Russia and China, as great powers and balancers, get involved," he said, adding that Afghanistan will be more peaceful in a multilateral balanced environment.

Key problems

Insecurity in Afghanistan has long been a severe problem for its people. A 2015 survey conducted by nonprofit organization Asia Foundation suggested that 42.7 percent of Afghan people regarded insecurity as the country's biggest national problem, up from 34.1 percent in 2014 - and at its highest level since 2007, the survey's program director Zachary Warren said after Karzai's speech.

Since 2004, the Asia Foundation has organized an annual nationwide survey of the attitudes and opinions of adult Afghan people. To date it has surveyed more than 75,000 people from the country's 34 provinces. "The 2015 survey included a sample of 9,586 Afghan people," Warren said. "We recruited and trained 939 local enumerators who went from door to door to conduct 40-minute face-to-face interviews with residents."

The survey result reflected the fears and concerns of Afghan people about the country's insecurity. More than 67 percent - the highest percentage in a decade - of the respondents said they always, often or sometimes fear for their personal safety.

Other local-level issues Afghan people face include unemployment, with 31.2 percent of respondents citing it as the biggest problem of the country. "In 2015 we introduced a new question on the biggest problems that young people were facing, and 71.4 percent said unemployment," said Jena Karim, the deputy country representative of the Asia Foundation in Afghanistan.

"It's a key domestic problem," she said. "Afghanistan has one of the largest youth populations in the world: more than half of its people are aged under 18."

These internal and external problems have led to the current pessimism of Afghan people. According to the survey, 57.5 percent of Afghans said that the country was moving in the wrong direction, with the most frequently cited reasons being insecurity (44.6 percent), unemployment (25.4 percent), corruption (13 percent), economy (12.4 percent) and government (11.4 percent).

"Tell me, if given the opportunity, would you leave Afghanistan and live somewhere else, or not?" This is one of the questions asked by their enumerators. Warren responded, "Last year, nearly 40 percent of respondents said yes."

Karzai (second from left) at SIIS with Zachary Warren and Jena Karim from the Asia Foundation

Photo: Courtesy of SIIS

 
Newspaper headline: In pursuit of peace