At the Mirwais hospital in Kandahar, the wards are filled with the collateral of insurgency. In one room, a father stands over the bed of a little girl whose torso is swathed in bandages, her broken leg pinned together with metal rods. The girl’s face is covered with shrapnel wounds. Another man, lying listlessly on a filthy bed, says he was injured by an American bomb aimed at one of the heroin processing centres in his rural village. Suddenly, the handheld radio of Red Cross worker Benjamin Nyakira crackles with the voice of a colleague. The entire hospital has run out of stocks of blood that are keeping alive the victims of homemade Taliban bombs and hi-tech Nato ordinance.
“Blood is a big problem for us,” explains Nyakira.
Mirwais hospital is desperately trying to stock up on drugs, fluids and other medical necessities, as well as blood. Call them election supplies. On Thursday, Afghanistan goes to the polls to elect a president for only the second time in its history and the Taliban have threatened to cut the throats of those who turn out to vote in the Pashtun south. The insurgency against American and British troops in Helmand has been gaining momentum for months. And in Kabul and in Kandahar, Taliban bombings have scarred the campaign trail. As Muhammad Ehsan, the deputy chairperson of Kandahar’s provincial council, puts it: “This is not a very good time to have an election.”
Surgical capacity at Mirwais has been more than doubled. If things get really nasty, an additional two surgery teams are on standby in Geneva, ready to arrive within hours.
The few foreigners who lived in Kandahar left some time ago, leaving only “essential staff” to manage the NGOs and United Nations agencies over the election period. Across the city, there is a palpable tension. As every Afghan knows, there is one powerful force in Afghan politics not represented in this week’s elections. But they have other ways of getting their message across.
“Just two kilometres from my house, the Taliban are telling people to reject the election. There is no guarantee that if you go to the polling station you will be safe,” said Ehsan.
Unstable, tense and bakingly hot, Kandahar will be key to Thursday’s election. It was from Kandahar, a city of 450 000 people, that the Taliban, led by Mullah Omar, began their march to power in the mid-1990s. Some observers believe that soon the city will be a Taliban bastion again. And it is among his fellow Pashtun voters in Kandahar and the south of Afghanistan that Hamid Karzai, the beleaguered Afghan president, must seek his new mandate, as much of the mainly Tajik north of the country appears to be dominated by his main rival, Dr Abdullah Abdullah. There are 36 candidates in this week’s election, but only two – Karzai and Abdullah – have a realistic chance of victory.
To be re-elected after this week’s vote, Karzai will need to win more than 50% of the ballot. Last week, one US poll gave him 44%, which would plunge him into a potentially risky run-off, almost certainly with Abdullah, who scored 26%.
To break the 50% barrier on Thursday, Karzai has been horse-trading with tribal leaders, offering positions and influence in a new government. But he also needs to convince the sceptics in the south that a new five-year term would be free of the corruption that has been rife since 2004. As in the north, there are plenty of people in Kandahar who say they will not vote for Karzai, a man they loathe and hold responsible for eight years in which security has collapsed and where government venality has become endemic.
“Actually, President Karzai is not the problem: the problem is his brother,” says Abdul Rahman, a tribal elder from Ghorak, a district outside Kandahar in which he can’t live because of the Taliban.
The reference is to Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s enormously powerful half-brother and the Karzai election campaign manager for the south.
According to one survey, Ahmed Wali, the elected head of the Kandahar provincial council, has some of the lowest approval ratings of any Afghan politician. He has been accused of handing out government jobs and land to his friends and allies, and extensive involvement in drug trafficking.
Despite the clout of the Karzai family name in the south, Ahmed Wali has angered so many people that some believe he has become a liability for his brother.
“He finds people in a tribe to ally with and then helps them to become powerful by arresting honest tribal elders. He is interfering in everyone’s job,” says Mohammad Askar, a tribal elder from the Alokozai tribe, who claimed that many of Karzai’s Popolzai tribe members would also vote against the two brothers.
“No one can speak out, not the governor, not the department heads, not provincial council members,” Askar added.
Aware of the disquiet and dissent, Ahmed Wali has been pulling out all the stops to mend bridges with slighted tribal elders, even telling one recent gathering that he was prepared to kneel down and beg forgiveness from anyone who thinks they have been wronged by him.
Over lunch on Thursday afternoon in his heavily fortified house in Kandahar, he appeared supremely confident about the resilience of his brother’s support base in the south.
“I am not worried about the vote,” he said. “People understand that violence is not President Karzai’s fault. They don’t blame the president for it. They feel sorry for him that he has had to face all these challenges since he became leader.”
But he says the one “big challenge to his campaign” is that Taliban violence keeps much of the Karzai voter bank at home on election day. Independent election observers in the province anticipate that only three of Kandahar’s 17 districts will be secure enough for election offices to open. In the country as a whole, it is estimated that as many as 700 of 7 000 polling centres will not function.
So, Karzai has been frantically trying to persuade local Taliban commanders to ignore their orders from Mullah Omar and allow voting to take place. He believes many are just as worried as him about the prospect of Abdullah, a half-Tajik politician who fought against the Taliban, becoming president. There are signs that some Taliban leaders are willing to turn a blind eye to anti-election edicts. Hamid Karzai’s ability to win outright may well depend on how many.
A reputation as a northerner did not prevent Abdullah campaigning in the city that is the movement’s spiritual home last week. Abdullah was born in Kandahar, although he has barely lived there. His father was a Pashtun, but his mother was a Tajik and he rose to prominence fighting in the 1980s alongside Ahmed Shah Massoud, the famous Tajik commander who barricaded himself into the Panjshir Valley, his northern stronghold.
When he touched down at Kandahar airport on Wednesday, it was clear Abdullah was entering hostile territory. His entourage scrambled into a fleet of land cruisers and sped off towards the city, veering between oncoming vehicles. This was not just the usual macho posturing common to all the main presidential campaigns. Abdullah’s people were acutely aware that the huge Canadian military vehicles that trundle along this road make it a magnet for suicide bombers. Abdullah has already faced violent attacks in far less hostile areas of the country — including one shoot-out that left a driver dead. The speeches made by his allies at that day’s rally were applauded by a crowd of 1 500. All attempted to burnish Abdullah’s credentials as a man of the south.
As one MP put it to rapturous applause: “In times of crisis, our country has been led by a Kandahari and now a Kandahari is coming again, and he wants to build security in this place!”
Such soapbox appeals to regional pride are the stuff of democratic contests the world over. But in Afghanistan’s restive south, the promise of security may be impossible to keep. Even if Karzai wins well here, the future of the city is unlikely to be resolved by democratic means.
Experts say that Kandahar has been comprehensively infiltrated at every level by insurgents who are methodically taking control of the city. “When the Taliban take over, it will be a steady process whereby eventually they will be the main power and authority,” says one of the few foreigners who lives in the city.
Apart from the occasional tank on the streets, the presence of the Canadians, who have a base inside the city, is virtually invisible — except for a barrage balloon tethered high in the sky armed with a super-powerful camera.
As the Taliban menace from the sidelines, Ahmed Wali Karzai’s fellow provincial council member, Haji Ehsan, is gloomy about the prospects for voter turnout: “Even if the Taliban change their minds in the next few days, [turnout] will be much, much lower than in 2004.”
The consequence of threats, stay-at-home voters and the desperate manoeuvres of the Karzai electoral machine may be massive electoral fraud. An attempt to update the electoral roll saw huge numbers of poll cards handed out to phantom voters. In Kandahar, “Britney Jamilia Spears” appeared in the lists.
Long lists of imaginary female relatives have been concocted by male voters. In many cases, Independent Election Commission (IEC) officials were happy to hand over registration cards, supposedly because they wanted to respect cultural sensitivities and not force women to appear, as required, in person.
According to a report by the Afghanistan Analyst Network, a group of Kabul-based foreign experts, some IEC officials fear that as many as three million voters on the register to do not exist. Thousands of registration cards may also have been bought from voters unwilling to take the risk of going to a voting station.
IEC spokesperson Zekria Barakzai claims that the combination of indelible ink on the fingers of voters and of election observers should stop fraud. But not, in the words of one western monitor, “if they buy off the whole voting centre”.
Security on the day will be crucial. Even in areas where polling centres open, many election organisations will be wary of sending their people to such hostile places. Then there is the unpredictable influence of local militia commanders, who Ahmed Wali Karzai says will be used to help guarantee security in some areas.
For months, Western diplomats, led by US special envoy Richard Holbrooke, have been lowering expectations.
In the words of one: “There will be mismanagement, chaos and corruption and fraud. The question is, how much? Every election in this region has its flaws.”
The worst-case scenario is that the combination of Taliban threats, bought votes and ballot-box stuffing will lead to what is being called the “Tehran scenario”: thousands of angry Afghans on the streets complaining at a stolen election. Abdullah’s campaign manager has already warned that, if his man does not win, his supporters will take to the streets.
One evening last week, Haji Ehsan was enjoying the relative cool in his garden. Ehsan, who is going to vote for Karzai, predicts that ethnic loyalties will trump issues such as competence or policies.
“To be honest, I like Ramazan Bashardost [a maverick anti-corruption candidate]. He is not corrupt and his hands are not covered in blood. He wants good government and he did a good job as planning minister. But he is Hazara and Afghanistan is a tribal society. He hasn’t got a chance.”
For President Karzai, it is hardly a ringing endorsement. But on Thursday, as insurgency, fear and disillusionment stalk the president’s southern heartland, even a half-hearted one will do. — guardian.co.uk