Afghanistan’s day of reckoning
What will be the test of legitimacy for Afghanistan’s elections?
No-one is using the age-old electoral mantra “free and fair”.
It is hard to find anyone who expects Afghanistan’s third major poll since 2001 to be fully free or fully fair.
These are the first elections since 2001 run primarily by Afghans – albeit with international support.
There’s been an unprecedented level of political debate and lively campaigning in this first truly contested poll.
But one embittered election expert described it as a “squandered opportunity”.
Badly cheated
Some foreign election observers have worried for months what kind of language they will use the day after Afghans cast ballots on 20 August for a president and members of provincial councils.
Set the bar too high and disgruntled candidates will seize upon this verdict as convincing evidence that their victory was stolen. Set it too low and Afghans who’ve invested energy and hope in a crucial process, however imperfect, will feel badly cheated.
“Good enough” is a phrase that slipped into conversation after the last parliamentary elections in 2005, amid disappointment over some of the candidates allowed to run and persistent allegations of vote rigging.
In a highly charged political atmosphere, pressure was exerted on irate losers to accept the results and move on. Too much was at stake.
Western officials involved in the process now admit there was “very significant fraud”. In some ballot boxes, neat piles of evenly folded ballots were evidence of stuffing.
A lot is also at stake this time, for Afghans and an international community determined to achieve success.
The question may be “good enough” for whom?
For all the talk of promoting democracy in Afghanistan, the ball was dropped after the 2005 polls.
Little was done to start work on this extraordinarily challenging process, despite a recommendation from the head of the Electoral Complaints Commission, Grant Kippen, to start preparations “well in advance of an election, including by means of a thorough lessons-learned analysis”.
“We started too late,” conceded a senior UN official.
‘Complicated elections’
In recent months, there has been a concerted push to fix gaping weaknesses and prevent the kind of fraud that could plunge Afghanistan into a political crisis at a critical juncture.
Doubts persist about the preparedness and impartiality of the Independent Election Commission. But there is praise too for its efforts to try to meet a series of deadlines.
UN envoy Kai Eide called this exercise “the most complicated elections I have seen anywhere in the world”.
Nothing can be taken for granted in a country still struggling to emerge from the heavy burdens of a quarter of a century of war.
How does a young election worker confront a powerful commander or tribal leader who arrives at a remote polling station with a stack of proxy votes from his village?
How do you hire and train thousands of women to carry out security searches in deeply conservative districts where women are rarely seen in public?
Afghan democracy may be a textbook all of its own. A myriad of influences and calculations weigh on voters in a political system driven by shifting networks of patronage and traditional loyalties.
But people who have survived a lifetime of hardship should not be underestimated. In earlier polls, despite Taliban threats and intimidation by armed commanders, Afghans still turned out in the furthest corners of the country boldly to exercise their right to vote.
The first presidential election after the fall of the Taliban was truly a high-water mark – an emotional, if not euphoric, moment in 2004 where more than 70% of Afghans turned out to give Hamid Karzai 55.4% of the vote.
Afghanistan’s day of reckoning
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