Two weeks ago, the nation of Afghanistan held its second presidential election since the U.S. invasion of the country in 2001. President Hamid Karzai was looking for another term in office against 39 other candidates, the most notable of which was Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, a ethnic Tajik who was a former foreign minister in the Afghan government. The election was seen as a measuring stick of how stable, or unstable, Afghanistan has become over the last several years.
By most military estimates, Afghanistan is in danger of being lost. Years of ignoring the country’s internal development due to the war in Iraq have allowed warlords to continue to hold control of parts of the country and the Taliban to spread out. Areas in northern and western Afghanistan which had before been pacified by American troops and NATO forces are now under more influence from the Taliban. Afghan experts are fearing that a Taliban insurgency could become a wider rebellion against the Afghan government.
While the Afghan election result is still uncertain and it is possible that there will be a runoff in October, extempers would be wise to consider the possibilities of the result and the impact the result will have on U.S. Afghan policy, the war in Afghanistan, and the country’s internal political structure. As such, this brief will detail some crucial events in the run-up to the Afghan election, the behavior of the vote, and why it matters for Afghanistan’s future.
Run-Up to Election Day
Forty candidates were competing in the Afghan presidential election and all are competing in a very tense political climate. The United States will have 67,000 troops in Afghanistan by the end of the year with the possibility of more to come. The Taliban is widening its hold on the country and the presence of the Pakistani Taliban over the Afghan-Pakistan border is enabling fighters to have bases of operation for their attacks. The Afghan public is also becoming very disenchanted with American involvement in their country, angered by eradication campaigns of opium crops and the lack of sensitivity of some American troops to Afghan cultural norms.
President Hamid Karzai, an Afghan warlord who was installed by the United States shortly after its toppling of the Taliban regime is not necessarily popular across Afghanistan. Karzai is referred to as the “mayor of Kabul” because his reach only extends within the city and he has very little power over the country at large. However, despite his shortcomings in managing the country successfully, Karzai is still seen as a figure who can keep aid dollars rolling into Afghanistan. Karzai has also been willing to use his clout with other warlords to enhance his electoral chances. His vice-presidential candidate for this election was Mohammed Qasim Fahim, who was a warlord in the Northern Alliance, the group who fought against the Taliban for control of Afghanistan in the 1990s. As the Council on Foreign Relations pointed out last week, Karzai has also reportedly made so many promises to other warlords that he may have to create new territories in Afghanistan so that they can become governor’s and share in a piece of his government. Clearly, Karzai wants to remain president, but his dependence on warlords is concerning for U.S. policymakers who fear that it is reducing the ability of the central government to play a powerful role in Afghan life and is merely reinforcing the backward relationships that have made Afghanistan such a fractionalized nation.
Karzai’s challenger, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah tried to tap into a message of change during the campaign. Abdullah has criticized the corrupt nature of the Karzai government and has promised better services under his administration. His rise to second place in most polls on the eve of the election shows that Afghan citizens are willing to give democracy a chance and have grown increasingly frustrated by the governing forces in Kabul. If Abdullah were to win it would represent the first peaceful change of power in Afghanistan’s history.
One of the more interesting stories in the run-up to the election was the role of women. Women have twenty-five percent of the seats in the national parliament reserved for them. They have grown concerned over the Taliban insurgency that threatens the rights that they have been granted under a more democratic government and formed political groups to campaign for their rights. Several times during the campaign, candidates met with groups of female voters to hear their concerns. The biggest concern was arguably a law proposed in April of this year for the country’s Shi’ite minority. The law stated that a man could withhold food from his wife if she refused to have sex with him. Women’s groups used their powers of free speech to protest the law going into effect and in this election they were seen as a force to be reckoned with, especially by Karzai because he needs them to win over fifty percent of the vote and avoid a runoff election.
The biggest fear prior to the election was that the Taliban would ramp up violence across the country. Violence in Afghanistan is being ignored to some degree by lawmakers in the United States, as domestic issues have stolen the headlines. However, how much longer it can remain out of the public eye is debatable as July was the deadliest month for U.S. troops in Afghanistan since 2001. Experts believed that if the Taliban was able to stage a great deal of violence on election day it would show that Afghans could not be protected by the government and that it would lower turnout so significantly that the election would give no legitimacy to the winner. To prepare for this, over 300,000 troops, under the command of the United States, NATO, and Afghans supervised the election vote, with Afghan troops taking the lead.
Election Day Behavior
True to their promise, the Taliban did stage a great deal of violence on Election Day. Overall, The Christian Science Monitor reported 135 attacks, with 26 people being killed. The level of violence could have been worse, but several attacks in Kabul and Kandahar were intercepted. While these were victories, there were poll stations that were not able to be opened due to violence, especially in the country’s south, where majority Pashtun’s reside. The south is an important region because that is where Karzai, an ethnic Pashtun, was expected to poll well. The Afghan Election Commission has reported that 6,192 of an anticipated 6,969 polling stations were open, leaving eleven percent of polling places closed and unable to have people come in and vote.
Fears of vote fraud remain widespread after the election. The biggest problem is that there is a lack of electoral observers who were able to watch the vote count. The Christian Science Monitor reported that only sixty percent of independent election monitors were able to supervise polling stations. Without observers there, it is quite possible that people could have voted at multiple polling stations or ballot stuffing could have occurred. Already, there have been over 1,500 complaints filed with the Afghan Electoral Complaints Commission, and that number is expected to grow.
Afghan authorities have also speculated, but not substantiated, that there were radical madrassas in Pakistan that released their students from class so that they could go and wage jihad in Afghanistan. If confirmed, this might deepen distrust between the Afghan and Pakistani governments, who Washington is attempting to bring closer together in meetings so that the situation in Afghanistan can be brought under control.
Why Afghanistan Matters
Generally speaking, Afghanistan is a large centerpiece of the U.S. war on terrorism. Those who opposed the war in Iraq, such as President Obama, call Afghanistan “the good war” that was not based on false premises and false intelligence. Although Obama has made Afghanistan a core part of his agenda and is launching a surge into the country by the end of the fall, political commentators say that he has not done enough to sell to the American people how important Afghanistan is. Already the public is conflicted about Afghanistan. While polls show that Americans believe Afghanistan is a justified war, a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll shows that 51% of Americans don’t think it is worth fighting anymore. Other polls suggest that the U.S. public believes that we have done all we can in Afghanistan and that we may not be able to win the war. A failure in Afghanistan would be akin to the failures of the British Empire and the Soviet Union to pacify Afghanistan and would likely embolden America’s enemies. Afghanistan’s government falling into the hands of the Taliban again and becoming a safe haven for al Qaeda forces would be a black eye to the U.S. and considering the events unfolding in Pakistan, it could embolden jihadists to push more forcefully to overthrow the Pakistani government.
For this reason, the Afghan election is a centerpiece for the Obama team and its European allies in NATO. A successful election was going to demonstrate that the Afghan state was achieving success and was going to give the new candidate a mandate. However, with the sloppy way the election was handled and the results are now being tallied there may not be a clear winner. After the election, Abdullah and Karzai both said that they had won and early exit polls give Karzai an edge, although it is not certain whether or not he will face Abdullah in a runoff due in early October. Security experts worry about Karzai winning by a wide margin because him doing so will have largely happened thanks to massive voter fraud in the south, and Afghanistan’s Independent Electoral Commission, who is to certify the results, was appointed by Karzai so it is independent in name only. However, other scenarios are fraught with problems. If Abdullah wins, there is much uncertainty in terms of how he would govern Afghanistan. If Karzai wins by a narrow margin, there will still be arguments as to the validity of his victory and he will hardly have a wide mandate to reign in warlords. Finally, if there is a runoff it could be a nightmare for security as resources would be sapped away from civilian needs for a new round of voting, with more violent attacks from the Taliban to cope with.
As the count continues, questions still linger about the tallies. The Council on Foreign Relations indicated last week that much of the fraud that occurred in the last presidential election in 2005 occurred after the voting was held, not during the voting. Although Afghanistan has a team of technical experts who are using computers to spot irregular voting patterns, there work has been shut off from the press and many worry if they will be able to have their results publicly announced. If the Afghan election turns out to be a farce in the eyes of the American public, when $63 billion will be spent on Afghanistan this year, it could turn out to be embarrassing for the Obama situation. Like it or not, Afghanistan has now become President Obama’s war and he will be held responsible for the outcome. If U.S. apathy towards helping the nation increases, Obama could face rebellion among Democratic members of Congress, especially if General Stanley McChrystal recommends at least 15,000 additional troops for Afghanistan.
Finally, some have argued that the winner of the Afghan election will be illegitimate because he will have been elected in the first place. Policy experts say it was a terrible move to remove the Afghan monarch from the newly created government because traditionally he conferred legitimacy upon the government. Without him, the rest of Afghan society looks at their democratic regime as an awkward, Western creation and an election that will not be weighed in terms of its validity as much as how “not fair” it was.