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The Afghan Election That Wasn't
by M. Nazif Shahrani
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READ
Afghan Warlords Will Control Voting In Most Of Country
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Less
than a month before George W. Bush's second bid for the White House,
his protege and partner in post-Taliban Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, faces an
election that both men hope will not only establish the legitimacy of
Karzai's presidency but also prove the Bush administration's claim that the
war-ravaged nation's transition to democracy has been a success. Over 10.5
million Afghans have reportedly registered to choose from among a slate of
16 candidates on October 9, 2004, less than three years after the removal of
the infamous Taliban regime and their al-Qaeda allies from power in Kabul.
"It's a phenomenal statistic," said Bush of the number of Afghan registrants
during his first debate with Democratic nominee John Kerry, "that if given a
chance to be free, they will show up at the polls."
In the vice presidential debate on October 5, Dick Cheney also trumpeted the
upcoming election as the "first one in history in Afghanistan." But
Afghanistan is not such a blank slate, and historically there has been no
one-to-one correspondence between holding elections and genuine democracy in
the country. The difficulties that beset the numerous Afghan elections of
the 1960s and 1970s are once again clearly evident. The playing field is not
level. Old structures and new U.S. policies favor the handpicked Karzai and
his small circle of Western-educated Pashtun technocrats.
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How meaningful are these alleged democratic exercises? |
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NOT A BLANK SLATE
Current
amnesia notwithstanding, Afghanistan held 13 nationwide elections
for the National Assembly (shura or wolusi jirga) before 1973, when Zahir
Shah, the last monarch of the Musahiban dynasty, was overthrown. Though most
of these elections were of the rubber stamp variety, some observers consider
the parliamentary contests of 1948, 1965 and 1969 to have been relatively
free and fair. The key word, perhaps, is relatively. Louis Dupree, a close
observer of Afghan politics from the 1950s through the 1970s, has reported
how during the 1965 elections a provincial governor told a large gathering
that "the elections would be completely free and that each man in voting
booth would be alone with God to make his own decision." After listening
politely to the governor's speech, Dupree continues, some elders turned to
the governor and said: "We appreciate all the government is doing to give us
a 'New Democracy,' and your speech was grand but now please tell U.S. who we
should vote for, as all the governors have in the past."
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A portrait of Hamid Karzai greets visitors at the Kabul airport
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There is little reason to think that the person-centered and tribally
organized electoral politics of the "decade of democracy" in Afghanistan
have disappeared. Among the original 18 approved candidates for president,
there were eight Pashtun, six Tajik, two Uzbek and one Hazara, and all but
four of them were running as independents even though a number of them head
political parties. The ethnic composition of the candidates reflects the
existing political cleavages within the society.
In a sense, the presidential contest will be the third national election in
Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban. The UN-brokered Bonn Agreement of
December 2001 called for a number of elections to help establish a
"broad-based, gender sensitive, multi-ethnic and fully representative
government" which was "not intended to remain in place beyond the specified
period of time" of about three years. More than 1,500 delegates to the
emergency loya jirga that elected Karzai as transitional president in June
2002 were themselves chosen through UN-organized elections in eight
electoral zones. Some 25,000 local representatives, in accordance with the
Bonn Agreement, elected the final list of delegates who attended the loya
jirga in Kabul. Karzai appointed small numbers of the delegates. The loya
jirga was to "elect a head of State for the Transitional Administration
[and] approve proposals for the structure and key personnel of the
Transitional Administration." The only accomplishment of the first loya
jirga, however, was to anoint Karzai as leader. Denied the privilege of
discussing the structure of future administration, the delegates were
quickly sent home. In December 2003, a second set of elections chose the
membership of the constitutional loya jirga, in which some 500 deputies
ratified a new constitution drafted by Karzai's advisors. Several deputies
demanded the formation of a transitional parliament to help in the
governance of the country, but Karzai and his advisors disbanded the
gathering without honoring their wishes.
Article 160 of the new constitution, touted by Karzai and his U.S. patrons as
the most "enlightened" in the region, urges that parliamentary elections be
held at the same time as the presidential elections. But the parliamentary
elections were postponed until April 2005, reportedly due to serious
security concerns. If these polls are indeed conducted at the appointed
time, Afghanistan will have held one national election per year since the
fall of Taliban. How meaningful are these alleged democratic exercises?
Because the structural problems of the past are unresolved, the spate of
elections in post-Taliban Afghanistan may become little more than a means to
make permanent what was promised to be an interim government and may even
lend international legitimacy to the person-centered system of governance in
the country.
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No established legal methods of
determining Afghanistan residency or citizenship |
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LEGACIES OF THE PAST
Meaningful
elections rest, first and foremost, on the existence of the
detailed and accurate demographic information that is lacking in
Afghanistan. During the twentieth century, the monarchy, and later the
Communist regime, simply declared that the dominant Pashtun groups were the
majority in the country and therefore entitled to rule over others.
Historically, in fact, the terms Pashtun and Afghan have been synonymous.
Twentieth-century governments avoided taking a complete national census,
fearing that it would prove them wrong in their demographic estimates. The
same claim of Pashtun majority status persists in the public pronouncements
of the post-Taliban government in Kabul, a source of considerable tension
with the non-Pashtun "minorities." Much to the displeasure of Karzai and his
close associates, the exclusionary nature of the term Afghanistan was raised
in the deliberations of the constitutional loya jirga and, to some extent,
has been an issue in the presidential campaign. There are no immediate plans
for conducting a nationwide, scientific enumeration of the population, and
so the highly exaggerated claims of demographic share by ethnic groups great
and small continue with no end in sight.
The dearth of reliable statistical information is further complicated by
other administrative legacies of the past. First, there remains the issue of
the arbitrarily drawn administrative provinces (wilayat) and districts
(wuluswaly/hukumati) that have served as the basis for allocation of seats
in Afghanistan's loya jirgas and legislative bodies (wulusi jirga and
meshrano jirga). These same administrative units continue to be the basis
for allocation of social services and economic development projects. Not
surprisingly, the number and distribution of such administrative divisions
on the ethnic-tribal map of the country has acquired enormous political
importance. There are a larger number of provinces (and districts within
them) in the predominantly Pashtun-inhabited eastern and southern regions as
well as the southwestern regions along the Pakistan border. By
administrative fiat, past governments ensured their claims of Pashtun
"majority" representation in all elected bodies. The transitional government
has used the same divisions to compose the recent loya jirgas. These
practices have tended to reflect the power alignments in the capital. After
the 1992 takeover of Kabul by the Tajik-dominated mujahideen government, for
instance, the number of districts was increased in some northern provinces,
especially in Badakhshan (the home province of then-President Burhanuddin
Rabbani) to "correct" the past disparities. In 2004, two new provinces, the
mostly Tajik Panjshir and the majority-Hazara Dai Kundi, were created by
presidential decree in a gesture to "multi-ethnic" government. Still, the
perceived administrative injustices against the non-Pashtun regions persist,
and will continue to mar the fairness of future national elections.
A second problem is that there are no established legal methods of
determining residency or citizenship in Afghanistan. Before the 1978
Communist coup, a kind of national identity document called a tazkira was
issued, to males only, in some parts of the country. The primary purpose of
the tazkira was to identify young men reaching the draft age of 21 and
ensure that they completed two years of compulsory military service. Young
Pashtun males living in the tribal belt along the Afghan-Pakistani borders
were declared exempt from this service, however, and were never issued the
tazkira. Nor did the Afghan governments ever issue birth certificates for
boys or girls. The recurring refugee displacement into neighboring Iran and
Pakistan during the last quarter-century of wars has rendered the problem of
proof of Afghan identity ever more complicated. During the 1980s and 1990s,
the UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported the registration of some 3.2
million Afghan refugees in Pakistan and about two million in Iran. There
were many Afghan refugees in Pakistan, especially from the central and
northern parts of the country, who were not registered for political
reasons, while there were allegations that many Pakistani citizens were
registered as Afghan refugees in order to receive monthly rations from the
UN. Voter registration, to say the least, is fraught with problems.
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Bush's "phenomenal statistic" may be evidence of a flawed
electoral process, and even a fraud in the making |
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"PHENOMENAL STATISTIC"
Karzai
and Bush have proclaimed that the reported registration of more than
10.5 million Afghans to cast ballots in the presidential elections is
evidence of their success in bringing democracy to Afghanistan. This number,
according to an Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU) report in
September 2004, may "well exceed 11.5 million -- roughly half the estimated
population of Afghanistan" once the registration of Afghan refugees in
Pakistan and Iran is completed. As noted by the AREU, an international NGO
funded by the European Union, that number far surpasses the 9.8 million
eligible voters estimated by the Joint Election Monitoring Body -- a UN and
Afghan government body appointed by Karzai to oversee elections. Upon closer
inspection, Bush's "phenomenal statistic" may be evidence of a flawed
electoral process, and even a fraud in the making.
There are two common explanations for the over-registration. First,
consistent reports from different parts of the country claim that
individuals have obtained multiple voter registration cards on the
assumption that they could sell their cards for cash payments at the time of
elections. In the summer of 2004, I met at least one person who had obtained
two registration cards in Badakhshan and others told me that they knew
people with several cards both in Kabul and other provinces. Second, there
have been press reports that some Pakistani Pashtun have been encouraged to
register for the presidential elections in Afghanistan. In the absence of
any meaningful way to verify voter identity, there is considerable
opportunity for abuse. These allegations are given credibility by the AREU
finding that in the southeastern provinces of Paktika, Paktia and Khost,
along the Pakistan border where Taliban attacks are frequent, over 140
percent of estimated eligible voters are registered to vote. Six other
predominantly Pashtun provinces (Laghman, Nangarhar, Kunar, Ghazni, Helmand
and Kandahar) are also reportedly over-registered, compared to only four
predominantly non-Pashtun provinces (Nuristan, Balkh, Badghis and Herat). In
the absence of other explanations, and in the face of mounting security
concerns about the safety and security of election workers, polling stations
and ballot boxes, the outcome of the presidential elections in Afghanistan
will sit under a cloud of suspicion.
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A process rigged for a Karzai victory |
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CAMPAIGNING, AFGHANISTAN STYLE
Abdul
Latif Pedram, one of the 16 remaining candidates, has complained that
the election is designed merely to benefit the incumbents Bush and Karzai.
According to the New York Times, many other candidates have threatened to
boycott the elections because of the de facto endorsement of Karzai by the
U.S. and European governments. If this should happen, as the New York Times
reporters wrote, the election will be "seen as American-directed political
theater designed to impress American voters instead of Afghan ones." No one
has yet called for a boycott, but two candidates have dropped out and thrown
their weight behind Karzai, whose administration primarily designed the
rules and regulations governing the elections.
Critics charge that Karzai has delayed work on reconstruction projects so
that he could use the occasions of their opening for campaign appearances.
Since Karzai was not able to make more than two trips outside of Kabul
before the official end to the election campaign, mainly because of threats
to his own life, he invited large delegations of tribal chiefs and local
notables to come to the presidential palace in Kabul to be entertained at
government expense. Karzai's use of national radio, television and print
media in support of his campaign has come under vociferous criticism from
other candidates as well as some election observers. According to BBC radio,
the leaders of one tribal community, the Tarazai, in the southeastern
province of Khost along Pakistan border, aired a statement on their
provincial government radio station threatening to burn the houses of those
who did not vote for Karzai.
Karzai was also the only candidate who enjoyed access to U.S. military
aircraft for campaign travel as well as round-the-clock protection by a
private U.S. security firm. The AREU report also found ambient suspicion that
the U.S. had allocated $30 million for the registration of Afghan refugees in
Pakistan, who are primarily Pashtun, to enhance Karzai's chances for
reelection. The appearance of favoritism in the ethnically charged climate
of Afghan politics makes it seem that the goal of the campaign is to elect a
president at any cost, especially in the eyes of the often ignored and
abused non-Pashtun "minorities."
Ultimately, the 2004 presidential campaign in Afghanistan is likely to raise
public expectations of the newly elected president to an unrealistic degree.
The aftermath will likely be defined by gradual disillusionment with the
government, and the almost certain division of the national vote along
ethnic-sectarian lines will usher in post-election squabbles reflective of
the country's long and sad history of inter-ethnic grievances. If the
elections are intended to elect a president at any cost, they will likely
succeed. If they are intended to articulate and inculcate the common
national values, shared goals and aspirations of a nation, and to offer
alternative visions and strategies for achieving them through collective
effort, they will fall far short of their goal.
M. Nazif Shahrani is professor of anthropology and Central Asian and Middle
Eastern studies at Indiana University/Bloomington Reprinted by special permission of the
Middle East Reasearch and Information Project (MERIP)
Comments? Send a letter to the editor.Albion Monitor
October 8, 2004 (http://www.albionmonitor.com)All Rights Reserved. Contact rights@monitor.net for permission to use in any format. |
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