World Bank Financed Activities in Afghanistan in relation to the Attack Intensity

of Terrorists
Jacob Mouw, Eric Stone

Problem Statement:
The World Bank has been financing activities and projects within Afghanistan by the
millions of dollars. Over the past decade, the number of project locations has increased
tremendously. The Taliban, the primary terrorist organization in Afghanistan, has continued to
carry out attacks throughout that time. Has the introduction of these projects caused any change
in the intensity of terrorist attacks? Have attacks caused a deterrence in the funding for new
projects? As aid workers are a primary target for the Taliban, determining if these World Bank
Activities have caused a change in terrorist attacks is a factor that should be examined.
Literature Review:
The inspiration for this project came after the literature review of similar research
conducted by three professors, who worked on the pattern of terrorist attacks in Iraq from 2004
to 2009. Unlike their research, however, ours will also introduce another variable (World Bank
financing) to analyze any patterns that occur in attacks based upon the activities of the World
Bank.
The paper that they completed, A Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Analysis of
Spatiotemporal Patterns of Terrorist Incidents in Iraq 20042009, introduced us to the
calculation of attack intensity.
Data:
The data of terrorist event information was obtained from the Global Terrorism Database,
hosted by the University of Maryland. This data includes the locations of attacks, the number of

casualties, the date, weapon type, and so forth. Spanning over forty years, this collection includes
over 100,000 events. The data about World Bank activities and locations comes directly from the
World Bank, which can be filtered by the year the projected started.
Princeton Universitys Empirical Studies of Conflict website provided the shapefile of
the country from which we worked.
Methods:
The calculation of attack intensity followed the formula which was explained in A
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Analysis of Spatiotemporal Patterns of Terrorist
Incidents in Iraq 2004200. The formula stated that attack intensity can be calculated as such:

Where, A= attack intensity, F = fatalities, I = injuries, H = hostages, and T = total number of

attacks.
To find this calculation, the data that was downloaded from the Global Terrorism
Database was filtered so that it only showed events in Afghanistan. This data was further filtered,
so that we could examine only three years: 2004, 2010, and 2012.
After separating the data amongst these three years, the attacks were organized by the
province in which they occurred. A new column was then created, which summed the total
number of casualties (fatalities, injuries, and hostages) for each attack. After this was done for
each event, the total casualties for each province were added together and then divided by the
total number of attacks. This data was then put into a new column, which represented the attack
intensity. This was completed for each of the three years previously mentioned.

After the attack intensity was calculated, each province was ranked according to its
severity of attack intensity (ie. the highest attack intensity was ranked 1) for each time period.
After compilation, a Rank Mobility Index was created for the changes from 2004 to 2010, and
from 2010 to 2012. Rank Mobility Index, or RMI, was calculated as follows:

Where, R1 is the rank of a province at the initial year and R2 is the rank of the province at the
latter year. With these sets of data, the locations of World Bank Projects were placed on the map
and let us visually examine how attack intensity changed with the their presence.
Conclusions:
First we took a look at some statistical analysis of Attack Intensity and how it related to
population and number of World Bank funded projects in the various provinces of Afghanistan.
When attempting to determine possible influencing factors for the intensity of the attacks, it is
hard to make a case for either population or World Bank activity as having causal roles, at least
linearly. Figure 1 shows the population distribution of Afghani provinces. There was little
correlation between population and attack intensity by province for any of the three years, as
2010 showed the strongest linear correlation with an R value of 0.4469 and an R-squared of
0.1997, indicating a very weak relationship as seen in figure 2. 2004 had an R-squared value of
only 0.096, with a corresponding R of 0.3098, indicating a very weak relationship between
population and attack intensity in figure 3. Finally as seen in figure 4, 2012 showed the weakest
relationship of all, with an R of only 0.0548 and an R-squared of 0.003. The fact that the
population of the province had little to no impact on the intensity of the terrorist attacks proved
surprising, as the number of people wounded, killed, and taken hostage factored into the

calculation of the Attack Intensity Index, and one might think that with higher population would
come higher likelihood of damage, either collateral or intended, to people at terrorist targeted
sites. Considering that the number of World Bank funded projects seems to correlate with the
population of the province, there is some foreshadowing as to how these projects would relate to
attack intensity.
We found through regression of average Attack Intensity against the amount of World
Bank funded Projects, that the projects do not have a strong influence on the intensity of terrorist
attacks. In 2004, there were only a total of 11 funded projects. The Kabul province had two
projects, as home of the capital city of the same name and as the most highly populated, and the
remainder had only 1 or 0. The amount of projects increased greatly between 2004 and 2010,
jumping up to 119, and then dropped a bit in 2012 to 93. These were new projects however, and
the data did not account for projects ongoing across years. In figure 5, we can see that the
number of World Bank funded projects did not have a strong correlation with average attack
intensity for each of the three years. 2004, having such a small amount of projects might be
ignored for the sake of correlation due to lack of a good sample size, but both 2010 and 2012
show inconsistency with the relationship. 2012 has an R value of 0.1980, and an R-squared of
0.0392, indicating a weak linear relationship, and in fact it seems that it might not be linear at all
as there are spikes at both 2 and 9 projects. 2010 has an R of -0.2569, and an R-squared of 0.066,
with a spike at 6 projects, which indicates a weak relationship but also something more important.
We see that 2012 Attack Intensity increases with the number of projects and 2010 Attack
Intensity decreases, showing that we really cannot determine at all between years whether the
amount of World Bank funded projects will increase or decrease the likelihood of an dangerous
terrorist attack.

All of the linear analysis, however, should not rule out possible influence of the World
Bank funded projects on Attack Intensity. Outliers make determining the relationship difficult,
but if you look at the trends in the data and the spatial trends, you can see that there exists
correlation between World Bank funds and Attack Intensity. For example, looking at figures 6, 7
and 8, and seeing how the World Bank markers change as the Attack Intensity changes from year
to year, there are a number of provinces that show correlation.
Consider the province of Helmand in 2010. There are 1-2 projects and with it a high
attack intensity. In 2012, however, there are no projects and the attack intensity has dropped to
the medium-low range. In the province of Farah in 2010, there were 1-2 projects with mediumlow intensity attacks, and in 2012 there are a few more projects coinciding with an increased
attack intensity bumped up to the medium-high category. Bamyan is another good example, in
which there were a few projects in 2010 with no reported attacks, and which in 2012 has and
attack intensity that is high, as well as many more projects. There is only one province, Parwan,
in which the attack intensity actually decreased with an increase in projects.
While there are provinces that have had a decrease in the number of funded projects
while attack intensity has increased, we do not know if those projects funded from 2010 are still
occurring in 2012. The number of project locations per province only includes those that were
approved for that year, so it is likely that, unless the project was completed quickly, it is still
ongoing two years later.
Spatially, it is interesting to see how the provinces with intense attacks are distributed. As
seen in Figure 6, 2004 had only a handful of high intensity attacks, but looking at 2010 and then
on to 2012 we can see the intensity increasing as a whole and the high intensity areas migrating
in towards the middle, and some of the border provinces remaining areas where high intensity

attacks continue. World Bank funded projects also increase and concentrate. In 2004 there are
not many, but the number of new projects increases about tenfold in the next 6 years, and in 2012
you can see how new projects become more concentrated in areas like Ghor and Bamyan.
Terrain and proximity to the border also seem to have influence, as can be seen in figures
6-8. In 2004 the borders were where the attacks were heaviest, particularly along the Pakistani
and Iranian borders. Those regions are also the less mountainous regions; you see some of the
central provinces are those that remain in the lowest categories of attack intensity, such as
Daykundi, which does not have a single attack in any of the three years. Mountains and distance
from outside influence probably make coordinating terrorist attacks, especially larger, more
intense and damaging ones, logistically difficult. These regions also are less heavily settled, once
again likely due to harsher terrain, and so not as likely regions for an attack of high intensity.
Finally, looking at figure 9 and figure 10, we can see how different regions became target
more than others as time progressed through the RMI. Some regions had high rank to begin with,
but then, for reasons such as foreign occupancy, military activity, or changing targets, they
dropped rank. The central provinces, for example, such as Bamyan, increase in rank and a
clustering of increasing ranks can be seen in northeastern provinces as well, where there are
higher populations. Overall, it can be seen that the presence of World Bank funded projects does
in fact correlate with attack intensity, whether or not one is causal of the other. The spatial and
magnitude changes of the attack intensity indicate that while there is a general increase in attack
intensity, there has also been migration of targeted locations and provinces which experience
high and very high attack intensities.

Appendices:
Figure 1:

Figure 2:

Figure 3:

Figure 4:

Figure 5:

Figure 6:

Figure 7:

Figure 8:

Figure 9:

Figure 10:

References:
"Download the GTD or Contact GTD Team." Global Terrorism Database. University of
Maryland, n.d. Web. 3 Mar. 2014. <http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/contact/>
"GIS Data." Empirical Studies of Conflict. Princeton University, n.d. Web. 4 Mar. 2014.
<http://esoc.princeton.edu/file-type/gis-data>
"Projects & Operations." The World Bank. World Bank Group, n.d. Web. 10 Apr. 2014.
<http://www.worldbank.org/projects/search?lang=en&searchTerm=&tab=map&countrys
hortname_exact=Afghanistan>
Medina, Richard M., Laura K. Siebeneck, and George F. Hepner. "A Geographic Information
Systems (GIS) Analysis of Spatiotemporal Patterns of Terrorist Incidents in Iraq 20042009." Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 34.11 (2011): 862-82. Web. Retrieved from
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1057610X.2011.611933#.U1rLl1cvnvB

Team Member Contributions:

Data Collection Eric Stone
Data Processing, Spatial Analysis, Model Implementation, Report Composition: Jacob Mouw
and Eric Stone