'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Afghan elections--a model?

In this Sept. 25 column in Al-Hayat, I asked:

[I]s it possible that the upcoming Afghanistan election-like the one organized under U.S. military control in Vietnam in 1971-is more about consolidating U.S. military power around the world than it is about seeking and respecting the "free will of the (non-American) people"?

Sadly, as of now, it still appears that this answer may end up being answered with a yes.

The whole debacle in Afghanistan over the use of non-permanent inks by election officials is almost beyond belief.

Sometime during the day yesterday, all 15 of the opposition candidates announced their decision to withdraw from the elections because of the demonstrated seriousness of the ink-marking problem.

The AP's Paul Haven wrote a great piece in which he contrasted the reactions of George Bush-- who crowed about the election being a "marvellous thing"-- with those of the actual election contenders in Afghanistan:

the opposition candidates met at the house of Uzbek candidate Abdul Satar Sirat and signed a petition saying they would not recognize the vote results.

Sirat ... said all 15 challengers to Karzai agreed to the boycott.

"Today's election is not a legitimate election. It should be stopped and we don't recognize the results," Sirat said. "This vote is a fraud and any government formed from it is illegitimate."

Islamic poet Abdul Latif Padran, another minor candidate, said, "Today was a very black day. Today was the occupation of Afghanistan by America through elections."

For my part, I also found extremely arrogant the idea that it should have been the one American member of Afghanistan's "Joint Election Management Body", Ray Kennedy, who immediately came out with all the statements certifying that, "There have been some technical problems but overall it has been safe and orderly."

I saw Kennedy giving his spiel on the BBC last night. He looked young, arrogant, and extremely American. Not quite good-looking enough to qualify as a "blond beast"; but playing essentially the same implemeneter-of-US-control role that Karzai's actual blond beasts still seem to be playing.

I don't see how any fair and impartial election-management body could come out with the certification of the election's integrity so fast and so categorically. The problem was not just that the voting-place procedures were evidently flawed in a number of places-- but even more important was the fact that all the non-Karzai contenders had publicly announced their withdrawal from the process in the middle of the main day of voting.

What message should their supporters around the country have been expected to take from that?? Of course, many voters--we will never know how many-- would have responded by not casting a ballot, or by spoiling their ballots.

How, then, can anyone at all say, as US viceroy Zal Khalilzad did today, that ""The Afghan Nation has spoken — it has voted for democracy and freedom."

Khalilzad also belittled the seriousness of the concerns raised by the non-Karzai 15. He said,

"For Afghanistan to win, the losers in the election should not undermine the achievement of the Afghan people."

I am concerned about the possible misuse (and/or abuse) of the concept of organizing democratic nationwide elections in Afghanistan for at least three reasons:

* The collapse into chaos of the election-organizing venture in Afghanistan could be a spur to other additional breakdowns in the country's already very frayed socio-political fabric, and thus exacerbate the country's collapse into further chaos,

* A misuse/abuse of the election-organizing system in Afghanistan might show us what the Bush administration has up its sleeve for Iraq, next January, and

* If one or both elections lead to increased chaos and fitna, then the whole concept of democratization as a way of helping to resolve tough problems of intranational coexistence and governence could become far nmore broadly besmirched, at the global level.

I understand that there are many, many people in the international community who desperately want the inauguration of decent electoral demnocracy in Afghanistan and Iraq to be successful. I am myself one of them. But I fear there may be some people who are so deeply invested in the success of these elections--even though, in Afghanistan, they seemed to be held on terms very vulnerable to US manipulation--that they are prepared to overlook what in other circumstances they might clearly recognize as fatal flaws in the system.

Ray Kennedy, who has a long history of writing about what makes for decent, fair elections, might well be one such person. But I suspect there are many others in the UN bureaucracy and in the community of international aid donors who just want the elections to be declared successful so they can get on with other things (whether in Afghanistan, or elsewhere)-- and they might even want this so badly that they would be prepared to overlook procedural flaws on the scale of the pull-out announced by all the non-Karzai candidates???

Who knows?

Let's all wait and watch the reactions of everyone who "pronounces" on the validity of this election very carefully.

Any such pronouncement, to be itself valid, should be measured, and not give any appearance of being a "rush to judgment". It should also give due weight to all the concerns voiced by all the candidates in the election, rather than favoring the views of one over those of all the rest...

In the long run, of course, it will be the Afghan people themselves who give the only valid "certification" on whether they felt the election was free and fair. But in the meantime, until the Afghan people themselves get a real chance to issue their judgment on whether the election was stolen or not, hasty or one-sided pronouncements by elements within the international community (including the US administration) can cause a tremendous amount of harm.