October 14, 2004

After the Afghan Elections
Jeremy Barnicle

Last week's presidential election in Afghanistan went well under difficult circumstances, but democracy will not grow there unless the international community steps up its commitment immediately.

From the start, United States has aimed low and achieved even less in Afghanistan. The Administration's budget request for Afghan reconstruction fell from $2.2 billion for FY04 to $1.2 billion in FY05. In last year's supplemental appropriations bill for Afghanistan and Iraq, Congress devoted $11 billion to U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and less than $1 billion to reconstruction. The next presidential administration needs to step up and devote the money and troops Afghanistan needs for democracy to take root.

Building democracies, especially in war-torn countries, is a tough business. Efforts to encourage healthy democracy in post-war countries plagued by lingering animosities, battered infrastructure, meddling neighbors, and weak legacies of participatory government have vexed even the most committed Wilsonians (or these days, neo-cons) in places like Bosnia, Cambodia, Haiti, Liberia, and now Afghanistan and Iraq.

In the course of democratization experiments, there is a common complaint in the international democracy-building industry (yes, such a thing exists): that the primary beneficiary of its efforts—the body politic in these countries—fails to cooperate. The desired democratic outcomes don't always materialize because people are too poor to worry about politics, too scared to engage in the political process, or too loyal to their religion or ethnic group to change the political dynamic that led to war in the first place. Frustrated democracy-builders throw their hands up in the air, say something about leading a horse to water, and head to the next hot-spot.

Saturday's presidential election in Afghanistan demonstrated that the Afghan people are neither too apathetic, nor too scared, nor too parochial to build a democracy. The election was by no means perfect—a U.N. panel is investigating complaints of multiple voting and ballot box tampering—but it was a major step forward for Afghanistan.

In spite of highly credible threats of violence from Taliban insurgents and a thinly-spread security force, millions of Afghans turned out to vote, often standing in line for hours for the chance to cast a ballot in their first-ever direct presidential election. Despite the presence of candidates from all major ethnic groups and regions on the presidential ballot, exit polls indicate that a solid percentage of voters of all backgrounds supported Karzai, a Pashtun. Conversely, thousands of Pashtuns voted for candidates other than Karzai. There was little disruption, little violence, and little sustained complaining about the process.

In short, with this election the Afghans have held up their side of the democracy-building bargain with the international community. Now it's time for the international community to fulfill its part of the deal.

To be fair, foreign diplomats, peacekeeping troops, and NGOs made an invaluable contribution to making the election a relative success. The U.N. worked with Afghans to manage the entire process. Western diplomats helped defuse the threatened boycott of the election results by the also-rans. NATO and U.S. troops provided at least some security in dangerous places. NGOs trained election observers, conducted polls, and built the capacity of citizen groups to get their voices heard in the campaign. But on the whole, the international community is still not holding up its side of the bargain with the Afghan people.

The international peacekeeping force in Afghanistan is still pitifully inadequate. The counter-narcotics funding and training so badly needed to control booming poppy cultivation and trade are falling far short of the need. International efforts to disarm private militias are behind schedule and having very limited success. Reconstruction pledges from donor countries—which amount to only a fraction of what the Afghan government has requested—are far from being met.

Afghans have started to show that they're committed to peace, stability, and democracy. The election demonstrated that they have the courage and the will to make this a success. If democracy fails to take root in Afghanistan after this promising start, the international community—led by the United States—will not be able to blame the locals.

October 14, 2004

Candidates Back Off Election Boycott, Vote Count Begins
Election Seen as Flawed but Generally Fair
Carl Robichaud

In a meeting with U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad on Tuesday, Presidential candidate Younis Qanooni, the chief rival of incumbent Hamid Karzai, joined several other candidates in agreeing to accept a three-member U.N. panel's verdict on whether Saturday's elections were free and fair. Qanooni had been among 15 candidates boycotting the election due to perceived fraud. With the top three challengers dropping their boycott, the path is now clear for the vote count to begin.

One candidate, who requested anonymity, was quoted by Reuters as saying "Qanooni and Mohaqiq have shown willingness to drop the boycott demand after meetings with Khalilzad...Khalilzad urged them to do so in return for accommodating them somehow in the future government."

While vote irregularities existed it appears not to have affected the outcome—exit polls suggest President Hamid Zarzai won decisively, and that any fraud would be peripheral to the outcome.

In a statement by the Chairman in Office, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) suggested it was "very impressed by the remarkable numbers of Afghans that have braved threats against their lives and bad weather to come out all over the country to freely cast their ballots in Afghanistan's first-ever presidential elections."

"I am not prone to call a black cat white," said the European Union's special envoy to Afghanistan, Francesc Vendrell. "We literally went trying to search for evidence of intimidation and violence. We found very little indeed. . .I'm not saying that we found everything—most likely not. But what I think is the case is that most people were able to cast their votes freely, and therefore to choose the person that they want to be their president for the coming five years."

Instances of Fraud Reported

Other reports have expressed greater skepticism. According to the Asia Times, other reports have noted that the government may have "exaggerated the number of registered voters—perhaps by 5 million." If these reports prove true, the "next president of Afghanistan is, therefore, likely to be elected by less than one-fourth to one-fifth of the population." But early returns give more reason for optimism, with 3.3 million votes flowing in with less than half the polling stations reporting.

In addition to the concerns over indelible ink, other documented complaints include ballot box fraud—according to one report, two boxes were reportedly missing hundreds of ballots in a Hazara district of Kabul, which might have affected the vote totals for the Hazara candidate Mohaqiq; according to another report, the manager of a polling station made off with two ballot boxes and returned them on election morning stuffed with ballots. In another incident in Spinbaldak, poll officers were reportedly ordered by their supervisor to complete 700 ballots in favor of Mr. Karzai.

Next Steps

It will take two weeks for the official vote count to be tallied, and for the UN panel to complete its inquiry into whether elections were fair. In Washington and elsewhere, however, spirits were high. U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice predicted that "this election is going to be judged legitimate," adding, "I'm just certain of it."

The next step in building Afghan democracy is parliamentary elections, scheduled for this spring, which the New York Times notes "will be crucial because without a democratic mechanism for brokering differences among the country's multiple ethnic, language and religious groupings, there can be no functioning national government. For these smaller-scale, more localized contests, higher voting standards and improved security are essential."

Regardless of the challenges ahead, the sentiments of the day were best captured by 93-year-old Abdul Hakim, who came to a polling center in north Kabul an hour before it opened to cast his ballot. Hakim noted, "I have lived nearly a century but I have never voted for my leader." That all changed on Saturday.

October 13, 2004

Afghanistan Elects a President
Jeremy Barnicle

The dust is still settling after Afghanistan's first-ever direct presidential election on Saturday, but even significant technical difficulties in the voting did little to cloud what many see as the election's inevitable outcome: that Hamid Karzai will be elected president.

In order to prevent people from casting more than one ballot, the Joint Electoral Management Board (JEMB), the U.N.-Afghan body running the election, gave poll workers indelible ink to mark the fingers of those who had voted.

As it turned out, some of the election workers used the wrong ink. Afghan and Western journalists confirmed that the ink easily washed off with soap and water and multiple news organizations reported that many Afghans voted more than once.

Karzai's opponents immediately cried foul and pledged to boycott the election results. But visits from Western diplomats-most prominently U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, and near-universal enthusiasm among Afghans for the election process seem to have convinced the also-rans that the boycott was not likely to change the results or improve their own political prospects. On Monday, Tajik leader Yunus Qanooni, who exit polls indicate came in a distant second to Karzai, dropped his opposition to the election.

If the election's outcome isn't much of a surprise, the relative smoothness of its execution certainly is. The ink issue notwithstanding, things could have been much worse. Taliban insurgents were threatening attacks to disrupt the polls, which could have resulted in the loss of life. More damaging in the long-term, the threats of violence could have seriously suppressed voter turnout, robbing Afghans of the chance to vote and undermining the legitimacy of Karzai's mandate to rule.

The attacks did not materialize. Voters turned out in the millions. U.N. Secretary-General has appointed a panel of elections experts to investigate the irregularities and report back to the international community and the Afghans. Robert Barry, a career U.S. diplomat who headed the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) monitoring mission for the election, acknowledged that the ink-related irregularities should be investigated, but that "the candidates' demand to nullify the election is unjustified and would not do service to the people of Afghanistan who came out yesterday, at great personal risk, to vote".

In short, the election appears to have been neither perfect nor fatally flawed. Karzai, according to exit polls, has won the necessary majority of votes in the first round. He is positioned to enter office with a reasonable degree of democratic legitimacy and now he faces the hard part: governing.