How to Make Surveys in War Zones Better, and Why This is Important
How to Make Surveys in War Zones Better, and Why This is Important by Andrew Shaver and Yang-Yang Zhou, Washington Post
Surveys are now a common, though largely unacknowledged, counterinsurgency tool of the contemporary battlefield. Afghanistan Nationwide Quarterly Assessment Research (ANQAR), Foghorn and BINNA Household surveys have played an important role in the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan, where coalition forces have used survey responses to gauge civilian attitudes on a variety of topics, often as a means of assessing the effectiveness of strategies carried out by coalition forces.
Similar efforts were carried out in Iraq. Shortly after toppling the Baathist regime, the U.S. military contracted with a local Iraqi firm to run a major public opinion survey in Baghdad. The effort was massive: in-person interviews nearly every month over a five-year period across the city’s nine urban and rural municipalities. In total, some 200,000 residents were randomly sampled and interviewed. Respondents were asked about everything from their level of support for insurgent attacks against the coalition and Iraqi government military forces to their degree of satisfaction with a variety of public goods and services to their past perceptions and future expectations regarding the abilities of Iraqi security forces to fight terrorism…
