Summary

A series of factors indicate that the August 20 Afghan elections might better have been postponed. The egregious flaws in the electoral process could aggravate the political situation and dash whatever hope there was for stabilizing the society and improving the lives of the people. It may mark the point of no return for recuperating the tarnished credibility of the central government. For many Afghans the election will end up displaying democracy as a sham and reducing the people’s trust in the Western-backed political process even more. The election indeed highlighted that Afghan misgovernment is still the Taliban’s most devoted ally and effective recruitment tool.

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US president Barack Obama called the Afghan elections on August 20 “the most important test of Afghanistan's political progress this year.” Then immediately after election day Obama and many international observers congratulated the Afghan people for pulling off the election amidst violent intimidation by Taliban militants. Ten days after the election this seems to be more a triumph of hope over reality.

With some 40 presidential contenders and the Taliban threatening to cut of the fingers of those who showed up with the indelible ink signifying their vote, the election seemed almost a carnival sideshow to the true test this year for Afghanistan: after eight years of failure, how to halt the spreading insurgency and the attendant violence. Unfortunately, to the extent that it was devised to legitimate the fragile government of Hamid Karzai and convince the publics of NATO nations that the Afghan war is worth the effort in sweat, blood and treasure, it may have failed on both accounts.

The elections are in fact a sort of microcosm of the current crisis in Afghanistan. They reflect not only the state of affairs in Afghanistan but also recapitulate the shortcomings of the international mission in the past eight years. There is little to be optimistic about Afghanistan today. Whatever achievements have occurred have been overshadowed by the escalation war and destruction of the country.

Afghanistan is now hosting over 100,000 US and NATO troops, the highest number since the invasion in 2001. Yet, ominously, The New York Times, four days after the election, published an article citing top US commanders, all of whom drew attention to the “deteriorating,” military situation and called for yet more troops.

A series of factors indicates that instead of advancing the goals of the government and its international allies , the elections in fact highlighted the very elements of the crisis a successful election might have ameliorated.

Women's Participation

Looking on the bright side, the election reflected one of the chief accomplishments of this decade: the education and political participation of girls and women. Women campaigners, voters and presidential candidates testify to the undeniable advances women and girls have recently made.

Education of girls has increased from none in 2000 to 2.6 million today. Women this year represent 40 percent of the 4.5 million citizens added to voting rolls. Ten percent of those registered to compete for provincial council seats were women and despite the dauntingly long odds and the tangible physical threats, two Afghan women competed as candidates for the presidency.

However, even these hopeful advances were marred by the final results: fear of Taliban violence and reprisals in the many conservative regions of the country played a large role in inhibiting the turnout of women. In fact, nationally, their participation appears to have been much lower than in either of the two past elections.

Talking to the Taliban

The general commitment among the major candidates to open talks with the Taliban was encouraging. However, while a marker of some progress in developing a workable strategy, this circumstance is also a belated recognition of the abject failure since 2001 to develop an agenda for negotiations and reconciliation. 1  

President Karzai, the most vocal in supporting talks, has vowed to intensify Taliban talks after the vote, and pledged that if re-elected, he will hold a traditional tribal gathering and invite the Taliban and other insurgent commanders to make peace. However, his government did not prioritize negotiations in the past and has little success to show for its efforts.

 The reconciliation program is virtually a dead letter and the Saudi mediation effort with the Taliban has gone nowhere. In fact, the issue of negotiations was ultimately eclipsed by military strategies to deal with an insurgency spreading numerically and geographically in southern and eastern Afghanistan.

Top opposition candidates (Abdullah Abdullah, Ramazan Bashardost, Ashraf Ghani) all looked askance at these reconciliation efforts and promised to do better at engaging the Taliban peacefully. Both Abdullah and Ghani advocated a grass-roots approach through community and tribal councils which address the groups’ grievances and the root causes of local support for the insurgency. Ghani advocated a cease-fire as the first step, followed by political negotiations. This is pleasing some international actors. For example, UN Afghanistan chief Kai Eide, has advocated a broad reconciliation strategy in Afghanistan, including talks with national leaders and the command structure of the insurgency, an issue he feels must be at the top of the agenda for the new Afghan government.2

Moreover, US President Barack Obama, despite including a reconciliation process as part of his new strategy announced in March, has underplayed the issue since then, offering little more than to talk with “moderate” members of the Taliban or integrate those who surrender unconditionally. NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen, like Washington, fears a loss of credibility in launching an ambitious negotiating effort. The military “surge” will allow NATO eventually to initiate talks from a "position of strength".

But if it is unacceptable to NATO to negotiate from weakness why should we expect the Taliban to do so? As Mariano Aguirre points out, “to expect the Taliban and other [insurgent] groups to plead for negotiations when they feel weak…..is an hypothesis that has never been proven.” 3  Today, because of broken promises, mistreatment and mistrust of the government and foreign forces, even low-level members of the Taliban are wary of accepting offers of reintegration. The final outcome of a tainted election may become a further impediment to any serious project for negotiation and reconciliation.

Afghan Political Culture

 
Afghan society and customs may have been an impediment to a free and fair election. For example, in some areas, men cast votes on women's behalf – an illegal practice seen as culturally acceptable in parts of Afghanistan. Hierarchical traditions may account for voter apathy as many believe that the outcome of the vote will be determined or manipulated by others: international players, Afghan strongmen, power brokers or the government. One voter explained: “Ask any shepherd in the mountains who the next king will be and he will say: whoever the West supports. Ask the leaders of the biggest parties, they will say the same. The vote has no value.”4  

Violence

The most critical issue for Afghanistan is deteriorating security, especially in the interior. Thus, it is no surprise that election-related violence refracted the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and cast doubt on the representative nature of the results. While not preventing the election, which would have been beyond its capacity anyway, the insurgency showed no sign of dissipating during and after the campaign. During the campaign people were killed in election-related attacks, including four staff workers for Karzai's campaign, as well as numerous failed assassination attempts.
The violence, which is at record highs this year, reached Kabul on the eve of the election with the attacks on the inner city and August 20 was in fact a bloody day in Afghanistan with more than 30 dead and hundreds of rocket and bomb attacks. As a result turnout appears to be unprecedentedly low (perhaps under 40%) and in provinces like Helmand, Kandahar, Uruzgan and Zabul, voting may have been as low as 5 to 10 percent. Even in Kabul, polling stations were half empty
Pre-election Fraud

But in the end violence may not be the most important factor in impeaching the legitimacy of the elections. The violence, after all, was perpetrated by those who are opposed to both the government and its sponsorship of the elections. More damaging may be what the nominal supporters of democracy did.

After criticising the failure of the government in Kabul (as well as its international allies) to provide internal security, the next most common complaint one hears among Afghan citizens is the mushrooming government corruption is at all levels. In that context, then, it is almost unremarkable that the election provided another snapshot of the Afghanistan malaise. Early fears that fraud could jeopardize the legitimacy of the vote, making violence worse and NATO’s job even more difficult, are currently being realized in full as the accusations of irregularities mount daily in the aftermath of voting.

During the run-up to the election reports of corrupting the process surfaced regularly, including selling or stealing voting cards, bribing powerful politicians to join them in return for high office, government jobs or money.

Two of the most egregious examples of a candidate willing to make shady political deals with unsavoury individuals come from the Karzai camp. The warlord Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, accused by the US of involvement in massive human rights violations, was allowed to return from Turkey and resume his former ceremonial post in the president’s office as Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief of the Afghan National Army. In exchange, Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek, pledged to deliver his northern region to Karzai.

Even more shamelessly, Karzai chose as his vice-presidential running mate, the former defence minister (2002-2004) Marshal Muhammad Qasim Fahim. It was another political play by the president for broadening his support in the north—this time in the Tajik–dominated areas. It was of secondary importance to the Karzai that there is a considerable body of evidence linking the powerful warlord to high-level drug trafficking, going back to before the 2001 invasion. 5  

The blame for this untoward development in fact is shared by Kabul and Washington. The Bush administration’s early alliances with warlords and its cavalier tolerance of drug traffickers legitimized a collaborative arrangement with criminal elements and signalled to the Afghan government that this was the path to power. In 2001, Fahim became commander of the Northern Alliance and while openly involved in the opium trade, became a highly-prized and highly-paid CIA asset; shortly after, he was named by Karzai as Afghanistan’s Defence Minister. The presidential elections are thus a reminder of role of malpractice in Karzai’s declining legitimacy and just how difficult it will be for the Obama administration to change a pattern of corruption so ingrained and widespread.

Election Fraud
Charges of vote-rigging on election day are still multiplying ten days later. More than 2,500 complaints have been filed so far with the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC). Electoral irregularities are not new, but the fraud this year is extensive, mainly in favour of Karzai, and increasingly characterized as “systemic and institutional”. 6

According to rival candidate Abdullah the vote was “state-engineered fraud”. Moreover, having few observers with access to polling stations complicated the balloting by encouraging fraud and then not being able verify it. Now, in the post-election period the fraud may well continue with the process of counting ballots. Undoubtedly, the Independent Electoral Commission a highly politicized organization headed by a director beholden to Karzai, will certify the election. Whether the election is won on the first or needs a second, it seems certain that losers are going to cry foul.

A Point of no Return?

On the last day of the month with little nearly half of the vote counted, and amid mounting evidence of fraud, Karzai is leading with just under 46 percent of the vote; Abdullah was reported to have 33.3 percent. These figures which, if maintained to the end of the count, would require a second round of voting between the two.

The election is looming as a watershed, but not the one the West or the Karzai government wanted. It may mark the point of no return for recuperating the tarnished credibility of the central government. For many Afghans the election will end up displaying democracy as a sham and lowering the people’s trust in the Western-backed political process even more. The election indeed highlighted that Afghan misgovernment is still the Taliban’s most devoted ally and effective recruitment tool.

Aggravated by the prospect of protests and violence, the election results are certain to complicate NATOs mission in Afghanistan and make its public relations job more difficult in the member countries. Arguably, it might have been less risky and preferable to have postponed an election which exposed such gaping flaws in the Afghan political fabric and the tragic failures of the international community.

Afghans are now trapped between both sides in an intensifying civil/international war and fearful as they watch the legitimacy and writ of the central government inexorably shrink. Obama has said that it is foolish to pretend we can replicate a Jeffersonian democracy in Afghanistan. The 2009 election may show just how remote a possibility a credible democratic state is in Afghanistan and how challenging a task it.

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Footnotes

1.  This sad history was nicely summarized by Fotini Christia and Michale Semple in ”Flipping the Taliban. How to Win in Afghanistan”, Foreign Affairs, July-August 2009.
2.  Eide’s position dovetails with that of Thomas Ruttig, who discussed this option in detail in his recent report with the Afghanistan Analysts Network, “The Other Side. Dimensions of the Afghan Insurgency: Causes, Actors - and Approaches to Talks”. AAN, 2009.
3.  In “Desafíos post electorales en Afganistán” El Correo Digital, August 29th, 2009.
4.  Martine van Bijlert, AAN (Afghanistan Analysts Network), Election Blog No. 2: “On the Campaign Trail”, posted: 10-08-2009).
5  James Risen and Mark Lander, “Alleged Drug Ties of Top Afghan Official Worry U.S.” The New York Times, August 2009, August 27, 2009
6  Carlotta Gall, “Increasing Accounts of Fraud Cloud Afghan Vote”, The New York Times, August 31, 2009