Afghans are more pessimistic about their future than ever
A new survey paints a grim picture of life under the Taliban
WHEN AFGHANS were asked in 2016 to rate their lives on a scale of zero to ten, with zero representing the “worst possible life” and ten the best, they gave themselves a respectable 4.2, the same as Indians and only a little below the median of 5.4 for 142 countries. By the summer of 2021 the score had plummeted to 2.3, making it the most miserable of all the countries polled by Gallup, a research firm, in a long-running series of surveys.
This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline “Khyber crevasse”
From the January 29th 2022 edition
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