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New poll, same old woes for Afghans
Sydney Morning Herald - October 21, 2009
Paul McGeough – Dragging millions of Afghans back to the polls will not redeem an unfolding disaster in which no party has clean hands.
Hamid Karzai tried to steal an election and only yesterday, two chaotic months after the vote, agreed to Western pressure and accepted that he had been caught, red-handedly stealing almost a million votes. Afghanistan will now hold a second-round run-off on November 7.
The United Nations knew what the jig in Kabul was, but instead of blowing the whistle, it sacked the would-be whistle-blower on its staff.
And in Washington, a damning report by General Stanley McChrystal has shredded the last skerrick of credibility for the US-led effort to stabilise Afghanistan – he says it will fail in the absence of about 45,000 more soldiers and a radical new strategy.
Karzai blinked first after he claimed that as a victim of Western interference and media exaggeration, he should not be forced to a run-off contest with his nearest poll rival, Abdullah Abdullah. The US President, Barack Obama, at the weekend signalled no new troops until Washington has a legitimate partner in Kabul.
After the release on Monday of the Electoral Complaints Commission's findings in Kabul, it is hard to understand how the words "Karzai" and "legitimate" can appear in the same sentence.
The commission's findings leave Karzai with less than 50 per cent of the vote, circumstances in which the Afghan constitution demands a second ballot.
Despite the new poll, the electoral crisis is not over. Given a widely held view that Karzai would probably have won without cheating in the first round, there are doubts about his ability to retain the supporters who did vote for him on August 20, especially those who had to stare down Taliban threats and violence to get to the polls.
And that paves the way for what diplomats warned of in interviews with the Herald in Kabul before the election.
Apart from his campaign's rigging of the vote, the other plank in Karzai's strategy was a series of vote-buying deals with tribal elders and some of the country's most notorious warlords and abusers of human rights.
Warning that Karzai had traded away sufficient power to render himself a political eunuch, one diplomat warned: "A run-off is too dangerous for Karzai. Already, he has promised too much and what he'd have to offer in another round would bankrupt the nation. He barter[ed] the power of the state for the moment of the election."
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