This week Hamid Karzai won the Afghan election, except that he didn’t. He was credited with substantially more than the 50% of the votes he needs to be deemed first-round winner, but the electoral complaints process is at the same time stripping him of votes and could end, perhaps after many weeks, by knocking him back below the halfway mark.
The dilemma for United States President Barack Obama and other Western leaders is that they could soon face a choice between being complicit in a flawed election or embarking on the difficult course of forcing a second round. If the electoral complaints commission gets the resources needed to investigate fraud allegations fully, something that the outside powers can either ensure or choose to neglect, a second round will certainly result.
When the US and its allies began to scrape together the extra troops and money needed for a presidential election in Afghanistan, they knew it would be something of a charade.
They had succeeded neither in persuading Karzai to reform his way of governing nor in cultivating politicians from whose ranks a different sort of leader could have emerged to challenge him.
Karzai, by using his network of warlord governors, buying up some northern bosses and drawing on his natural supporters in the south of the country, would win. His rivals had no chance, even if there was a second round.
The result would be a very expensive foregone conclusion and the best the outside powers could hope for was to somehow get through it without too much trouble. Then, having performed a cursory obeisance to democratic procedures, they could get on with the war along the lines being plotted by the US’s new generals and diplomats in the region, tackling Karzai and his many faults afterwards.
Their mistake was that, while they expected local chieftains to bribe, pressure and marshal voters to the polls, they did not expect barefaced rigging and ballot-box stuffing on the scale which now seems to have occurred.
One Western diplomat told the New York Times that Karzai’s men set up hundreds of fictitious polling stations, which registered hundreds of thousands of ballots in his favour. He and other diplomats and officials added that the Karzai organisers took over around 800 legitimate stations, kept out citizens and stuffed boxes with fake votes.
The elders of one tribal grouping told reporters how they had decided to support Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai’s main rival, but found officials inside the polling station filling boxes with votes for Karzai.
The fraud was so ham-handed that in some provinces the Karzai vote was 10 times greater than the number of people who actually voted. The complaints commission has discarded 200 000 votes as too dubious to be counted. And although more international oversight might limit fraud a second time around Karzai would still almost certainly win, as few believe the Pashtun population will vote in any numbers for Abdullah Abdullah, whom they regard as a Tajik.
Karzai could have won without rigging. But he apparently could not bring himself to trust the people or the democratic system to which he is, in theory, committed.
The outside powers should press for the most thorough investigation of fraud and a second round if necessary.
This election has made things worse, rather than better in Afghanistan. —