A lovely stats related quote I picked up somewhere states, "You can torture statistics enough to admit to anything."

Population figures in Afghanistan are ripe for torture since there are no reliable or consistent figures to refer to. CIA World Factbook uses the higher end figure of approx 33M versus the Afghan Central Statistics Office (CSO) of approx 27M (for 2009) which are all growth based projections from 1979 census data. The UN data office (statistics division) uses a figure of 27M for 2008 and promotes a population growth rate of 3.9% (or 5.4% urban/ 3.4% rural) which would place the settled population close to 29M today. If this means IDPs/refugees are not included, then we could be at or above the 33M figure. Rural population is quoted at 27% but msot of Afghanistan is non-arable making even the rural population fairly concentrated to rivers and valleys throughout the regions.

Urban centres are under tremendous pressures due to in-migration within the 12 major cities which is influenced by operations in the rural areas and the draw of the PRTs and major NATO bases.

The CSO has been planning to conduct a new census for at least the last 3 years and currrent planning is focussed for this to occur in 2010. Until then, there are no reliable figures nor reliable trends to rely upon.