Pitt Magazine / Summer 2012 / Cara Masset
Platinum Award in the Writing/News Article category / Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals
With a young constitution and, so far, fractured governance, strife-ridden Afghanistan is struggling to create a new future for its people. A Pitt professor with an unusual background is conducting research that reveals what Afghans really think about what’s ahead.
There is a living room in the northern plains of Afghanistan where the walls are painted pink. The drapes are pink, too. There are lamps and a radio, new electrical luxuries made possible by the resolve of the grandmother who lives in the home. She has single-handedly brought electricity to her village in the post-9/11 reconstructive years, an accomplishment resulting in her election to village chief. Elders traditionally govern villages in this land, but more often than not, the political leaders are grandfathers, not grandmothers.
The pink-passioned woman, whom we will call Fatima to protect her identity, has 32 grandchildren and counting. She earned the support and respect of her neighbors after she traveled hundreds of kilometers to the Afghan capital of Kabul to meet government officials and demand the installation of electricity. She now protects the village’s new electrical grid by patrolling the roads on her motorbike under moonlight if she suspects anyone is trying to illegally hook up to it. She has directed profits from the sale of the village electricity into the building of a bridge and the construction of a mosque where women and men will be allowed to worship together. Behind the wheel of a tractor, she has even taken part in the heavy construction of the mosque’s beginnings.
Although Fatima has as much brawn as the men in her province who play buzkashi (a sport similar to polo but played with the head of goat instead of a ball), she is a lady who wears bangles and spectacles and welcomes villagers into her pink living room to discuss politics and problems, some of which she relays to a district governor on Saturdays, the first day of the workweek in Afghanistan.
It was on a Saturday in 2007 when Fatima was addressing business matters at the district governor’s office that she encountered a research team led by Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, who’s now an assistant professor in Pitt’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. The team, which was conducting a large-scale study of village governance in Afghanistan, was in awe. Fatima was the first woman chief they had met during their expeditions to dozens of villages around the country.
“Everything I’ve done in Afghanistan has been full of surprises,” says Murtazashvili, who has been involved in political science research and development work in the country since 2005.
“I think part of the reason is that there’s not a lot of good research out there. There are a lot of secondhand, third-hand resources. There are a lot of people writing about the insurgency, about what foreign troops are doing, what humanitarian organizations are doing. There’s not a lot about what Afghans think. It was listening to Afghans that caused me to completely reroute my research and reformulate what I had thought I was going to find.”
Through firsthand research—which has entailed crisscrossing Afghanistan’s steppes and mountains in a van, sleeping on floors wherever she and her team can find accommodations, and interviewing Afghans like Fatima in their native languages—Murtazashvili has become one of the United States’ top scholars on Afghanistan. She has collected reams of data about how Afghan farmers and laborers feel about pressing issues that are regularly bantered about in international media—the efficacy of the country’s new electoral system, whether democracy will work there, what the roles of traditional leaders are, how the Taliban is affecting citizens, what the outlook is for the future of the nation. Her work—which parses the complexities of everyday life that are sometimes overlooked in Kabul or Washington—has been by turns, she says, exasperating and joyful, nauseating and reassuring, depressing and hopeful.
The findings of two of her studies, one on the operations of 32 village governments and another on how more than 8,600 Afghans view electoral reform, are now informing Afghan and American policy makers, soldiers in the U.S. military, and her graduate students at the University of Pittsburgh. One of the most important takeaways from her research is this: Although international media have used adjectives like “ungovernable” to describe Afghanistan, traditional village governments throughout the country are thriving, and they’re doing a better job of incorporating democratic reforms like elections and ballot boxes than many of the official community councils set up by national and international policy makers. Even Murtazashvili was surprised to encounter a staple of democracy in remote villages: “I never expected to find ballot boxes,” she says. Fatima, the democratically elected traditional leader who electrified her village, is one powerful example of the Afghans’ own push for reform.
“What I try to remind people is that this traditional way of doing things isn’t the same traditional way it was 50 years ago or 60 years ago,” says Murtazashvili. “Things evolve. People migrate. They come back. A lot of the core principles are the same, but the technology of governance changes. We tend to think of traditional governance in this very static way, but it’s actually very dynamic. So sometimes the names of the traditional leaders change. Sometimes the way they’re selected changes.”
Murtazashvili says that her success with gathering valuable insights from the people who live in one of the 21st-century’s geopolitical hotspots has come from her willingness to fly by the seat of her pants, though in Afghanistan she more literally flies by the seat of her skirts. That’s why, when members of her research team realized that a lady who had popped out of a district governor’s office was not a secretary but a village chief, Murtazashvili directed the team to ask for permission to visit her village in addition to those they had already planned to visit. If they had stuck to their original plan, they might not have learned that there are more than a dozen female village chiefs in a nation where many outsiders would incorrectly assume there are zero.
One summer morning, Fatima eagerly invited Murtazashvili and her teammates into her pink receiving room, where they drank green tea, listened to constituents who stopped by to ask Fatima for advice, and chatted in the language of Dari about life in the historic Balkh Province known for its prominence during the heyday of the ancient Silk Road. It was apparent that Fatima is a doer, a leader who has taught her daughters and granddaughters to read, caring little about whether or not warlords or Taliban members in the country approve of women’s education and leadership.
Years before this meeting in the Afghan plains, Murtazashvili’s grandmother had guided her through her reading education, too. Even before Murtazashvili entered kindergarten in Columbus, Ohio, her grandmother began asking her to read the newspaper aloud every day. Her grandmother had lost her eyesight, so the young Murtazashvili took on the responsibility of relaying world news, quickly developing her vocabulary as she grew taller. It was the 1980s, when the Cold War was still on and the Soviet Union was fighting a war in Afghanistan.
Murtazashvili’s family later moved to Pittsburgh. At Taylor Allderdice High School, she signed up for Russian language classes, a decision influenced by her diet of world news. In high school, she took a trip to Moscow and then returned to the city several years later through a study abroad program with Georgetown University, where she was majoring in international politics. By that time, Murtazashvili could read Russian newspapers and follow headlines about a war in Chechnya, a region that was unsuccessfully seeking independence from Mother Russia, as many other countries like Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan had done when the Soviet Union collapsed. Murtazashvili was fascinated by these new “stan” countries (“stan” means “land”).
When Murtazashvili joined the Peace Corps after college and was given the choice to live anywhere in the former Soviet Union because of her language skills, she chose to go to Central Asia. Life and politics in that region of the world were sparsely covered by journalists, she knew. She began teaching English at a secondary school in Uzbekistan, near the border with Afghanistan’s Balkh Province, where Fatima lives. Murtazashvili learned the local languages of Uzbek and Tajiki, but vendors at bazaars generally spoke to her in Russian when they saw her blonde hair and green eyes, assuming she had traveled from elsewhere in the former Soviet Republic. She began reading Uzbek newspapers, following debates about what currency the new country should use, what the official language should be, and other concerns related to nascent statehood.
After her Peace Corps service, Murtazashvili stayed in Uzbekistan and become a democracy specialist with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). She was in charge of managing and awarding grants to organizations that were promoting democracy in an increasingly authoritarian state, requiring difficult decision making. To develop better skills for evaluating which organizations would likely achieve better results with grant support, she decided in the summer of 2001 that she would return to the United States to attend graduate school and perhaps write a thesis on Uzbekistan.
Then 9/11 happened, and the USAID outpost in Uzbekistan was suddenly swarmed with U.S. military officers, members of U.S. Congress, and humanitarian workers. As a result, Murtazashvili found herself sitting in on railroad-tariff negotiations for all the Americans who were cautiously crossing the border from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan, and she had so much work that she nearly missed taking the Graduate Record Examination for her graduate school application. The experience, though, gave her unique insights into the region.
Before long, she returned to the United States to pursue two master’s degrees—one in political science and the other in agriculture and applied economics—at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As usual, Murtazashvili kept up with the newspapers, and she was closely following developments in Afghanistan, realizing there were many similarities between the languages and cultures of Afghans and Uzbeks. Eventually, she set her sights on writing a PhD thesis about Afghanistan and, when she couldn’t get traditional research funding to visit the country because it was deemed too dangerous, she decided to fly by the seat of her skirts, show up in Afghanistan, and add Dari to her Rolodex of languages. She had a hunch that if she talked to former USAID colleagues on the ground, she’d work her way into a research project, just like Fatima had a hunch that if she showed up in Kabul, she’d find someone who could help her bring electricity to her village.
Her hunch was right. Murtazashvili became a senior research officer with the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit and blended her work there with her PhD dissertation. She was assigned to lead a study on the effectiveness of community councils, which had been set up by foreign aid organizations as a new form of governance. Initially, she expected to find that the councils were improving everyday life for Afghans. She changed her mind after overseeing a team of six Afghan researchers—three men and three women hailing from the country’s varying regions and ethnic groups—as they conducted 300 interviews and focus-group discussions in villages around the country. The team found that villagers were doing a fine job of governing themselves without the community councils, which were only working on small-scale projects like building wells. Murtazashvili presented this result to officials in humanitarian aid organizations and in Afghanistan’s national government.
It’s an important finding. “The intervention that communities need isn’t at the community level,” she says, based on the data. “It’s at the broader, higher level to provide public goods and services that transcend individual communities.” It’s easy, she adds, to implement one-time community projects like a well, a bridge, a retaining wall, a school. It’s much harder to provide services and products that are larger in scale and duration. In essence, the question becomes one of national governance and how to accomplish that.
Her evidence shows that villagers like Fatima, who discussed her accomplishments with BBC News this year, are perfectly capable of building bridges and managing local affairs, something they had been doing throughout the Russian occupation in the 1980s, civil war in the 1990s, and the infiltration of the Taliban. Afghans have more trust in their traditional village leaders, as opposed to representatives who have been tapped to serve on foreign-made community councils. As Afghanistan rebuilds, Murtazashvili says her research suggests that policies should be focused on strengthening the regional and national governments to provide services like a public health system and courts for mediating inter-village conflicts. The Taliban became powerful in Afghanistan partly because it established ways for villages to resolve conflicts with each other, guidance that wasn’t forthcoming from a national government.
After earning her PhD in political science in 2009, Murtazashvili joined the faculty in Pitt’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA), where she has been teaching courses on public administration and the politics of Central Asia as well as serving as a role model for students who are interested in conducting on-the-ground research in politically troublesome zones where accurate data for policy makers is in demand. She is collaborating with her husband, Ilia Murtazashvili, who also is on the faculty at GSPIA, on a project to examine property rights and property disputes in Afghanistan. And she’s continuing to collaborate with nongovernmental organizations there.
Last summer, Murtazashvili flew to Kabul with a daughter in her womb to design a study on electoral reform for Democracy International and USAID; the study’s results will be published in English as well as in three languages spoken in Afghanistan. Unfazed by her pregnancy and conducting her work with the sort of commitment required of a military soldier—as GSPIA dean John Keeler describes her research activities—Murtazashvili recruited Afghan colleagues who were eager to embark on another project with her.
“I’ve learned a lot of research skills from Murtazashvili. I’ve learned how to conduct qualitative research in the field, how to consider ethical roles like informed consent, how to manage a big team, how to collect data with good quality, and how to represent research findings to stakeholders,” says Hassan Wafaey, who conducted field research on village governments with Murtazashvili. He is a senior research manager with Democracy International who hails from Afghanistan’s central Ghazni Province.
For the electoral reform study, Wafaey helped Murtazashvili to develop a national public opinion survey and guidelines for qualitative interviews in three different districts that would gauge how Afghans view national parliamentary and presidential elections as well as democracy in general. Democracy has existed in the country only since 2004, when the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan was ratified, so Afghans are still figuring out how to make this new form of government work for them. Murtazashvili began sharing the survey results this spring, writing in a summary report that “discussion of democracy and elections is challenging in Afghanistan as people have diverse understandings of two institutions that are key to building representation—democracy and political parties.”
Murtazashvili explains that “there was a lot of variation between how people understood what democracy is. Everyone said it’s freedom. But what’s freedom? So we probed, ‘What is freedom?’ Many women in one part of the country described it as the freedom to be hidden properly. They contrasted it with risqué soap operas, and they associated it with Islam. Constraint was how they described freedom. In some parts of the country, they described it as economic freedom, the freedom to have a job, the right to employment. In another part of the country, faced with insurgency, they described freedom in terms of security.”
The study also revealed widespread distrust of political parties, particularly because the Dari term for political party is associated with armed factions. Sixty-nine percent of survey respondents said political parties do not promote peace.
In terms of the country’s future, the public-opinion weathervane is pointing toward an impending storm, says Murtazashvili, but it could shift. Of the 8,600 people surveyed, 36 percent said the country is moving in the wrong direction, 24 percent said it’s moving in the right direction, and 30 percent said it’s improving in some areas, but worsening in others. How President Obama’s promise at a NATO summit in May to withdraw troops from Afghanistan within a year will affect the country is uncertain, but Murtazashvili and her colleagues are hopeful that their data will nudge the country in a better direction, supporting efforts to strengthen the national government so it can effectively aid village leaders.
“Among all the research projects I’ve previously worked on, this research project has given me the impression that apart from producing reports, we are also advocating to bring changes to Afghanistan,” says Fauzia Rahimi, a senior researcher with Democracy International. “It is very important, and I am so excited to see how the results of our work will influence a good electoral system in Afghanistan in the future.”
Murtazashvili only knows that there will probably be surprises. In addition to working as a professor and scholar at Pitt, she trains military officers and soldiers on village governments in Afghanistan through the Naval Postgraduate School. She always tells them about a chief who was bold enough to trek to the nation’s capital and ask for electricity. She doesn’t tell them until the end that it was a grandmother with a pink living room.