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Afghanistan
POPULATION
No comprehensive census based upon systematically sound methods
has ever been taken in Afghanistan. Most population statistics
rely on estimates and samples. Successive governments have manipulated
figures for their own political objectives. UN agencies, hundreds
of NGOs, as well as bilateral agencies use different figures to
suit their purposes in designing assistance programs. Furthermore,
instability caused by the Soviet-Afghan war and the subsequent
civil war resulted in massive movements of uprooted peoples. These
factors also make demographic sampling necessarily imprecise.
The most scientific demographic survey carried out in Afghanistan
was also one of the first. Conducted in 1972-74 by the State University
of New York (SUNY) for the United States Agency for International
Development (AID), in cooperation with the Afghan government,
this survey reported a settled population of 10.18 million. It
did not cover the entire country, and the nomadic population was
not surveyed. The nomads were separately estimated at slightly
more than 1 million.
An official census was later hurriedly taken over a three-week
period in June 1979 after the establishment of the People's Democratic
Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), with UN assistance. This count estimated
the population to be 13.9 million, including 800,000 nomads, but
it is little credited since only 56 percent of the population
was enumerated due to mounting resistance in the countryside.
Grossly inflated figures were added for the rest.
The Statistical Yearbook published in 1983 by the Babrak
Karmal government during the Soviet occupation claimed a total
population of 15.96 million for 1981-82. Presumably this included
over five million refugees in Pakistan and Iran. (see Refugees,
this ch.).
Afghanistan's population in 1995 was estimated at 18.4 million
by the Population Reference Bureau, a nonprofit agency based in
Washington, D.C. This estimate, like others before it, is based
on unreliable data, as the Bureau itself cautions. The Human
Development Report, 1996 estimates that the population will
rise to 26.7 million in the year 2000, using, however, a high
growth rate of 6.1 percent. A rate of around 2.2 percent is more
typically employed. UNDP calculations give a 1993 crude birth
rate of 5l/1000, a crude death rate of 22/1000, and an infant
mortality rate of 163/1000. Estimates of the average life expectancy
at birth was 43.7 years. Again, growth figures depend on what
is taken into account -- refugees, war dead estimated to range
from three-quarters of a million to a million and a half, birth
and death rates -- all of which are open to question.
The average population density was calculated in 1993 at 23.4
per square kilometer, but it varied widely between provinces:
from 489.4 per square kilometer in Kabul to 0.7 in Nimroz, a province
in the southwest with vast sandy and stony deserts. Residence
was also unevenly distributed between rural and urban settlements,
with over 35,000 rural settlements, but only sixty-four urban
centers. Probably no more than ten of these centers are true cities,
and other towns could be considered. Again, numbers depend on
definitions. The United Nations reported that eighty-one percent
of the population lived in rural areas in 1993.
What is important is that the gradual rural-urban migration noticeable
over a period of several decades increased rapidly during the
1960s as the government laid out new road systems and quickened
development. This trend accelerated during the Soviet-Afghan War
as internally displaced persons (IDPs) fled the war-torn countryside
for the relative safety of the cities. A number of major cities
such as Kabul, Ghazni, Jalalabad, and Mazar-e Sharif absorbed
IDPs in great numbers, causing overcrowding and rising demands
for city-provided services. By 1985, unconfirmed reports placed
Kabul's population at over two million, more than a 100 percent
increase in less than a decade. Since the mujahidin took possession
of Kabul in 1992, however, the incessant fighting by warring factions
for control of the capital has caused the population to swell
and diminish according to the level of security at any given moment.
Data as of 1997
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