Afghan elections, part 2

I wrote here Sunday about my concerns that the US-dominated order in Afghanistan might essentially steal the Afghan elections on Karzai’s behalf… Also, that many outsiders now working in Afghanistan might be,

so deeply invested in the success of these elections … that they are prepared to overlook what in other circumstances they might clearly recognize as fatal flaws in the system.

Last night the BBC had this interesting story on their website:

Afghanistan’s leading human rights body has criticised the United Nations for the way it has set up its investigation panel into irregularities during the recent presidential election, saying it is not independent…
[T]he UN has decided not to appoint any Afghans to the panel.
That decision raises “a number of concerns” about its independence, according to the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC).

The author of the piece, the Beeb’s Andrew North reporting from Kabul, added that,

The senior spokesman of the AIHRC, Nader Naderi, argues that many of the problems with the election are being blamed on “international staff and organisations”, not on Afghans.
Yet it is all foreign nationals who will be on the panel.
“We recommended an Afghan expert from our commission to build confidence in this process,” says Mr Naderi, a position also supported by European Union officials in Kabul.
But he says this was rejected.

I noted in that earlier JWN post that,

In the long run, of course, it will be the Afghan people themselves who give the only valid “certification” on whether they felt the election was free and fair. But in the meantime … hasty or one-sided pronouncements by elements within the international community (including the US administration) can cause a tremendous amount of harm.

I’ve been thinking a bit more about this whole phenomenon of the huge rush of (faintly patronizing) good feelings that people in the rich portions of the democratic world get when they see people from the other side of what Paul Farmer calls the Great Epidemiological Divide lining up for their first, “historic” democratic votes.
I certainly feel good about it, in general. South Africa, 1994! Wow! Even Afghanistan, 2004…
Except that in the latter case, there evidently were serious problems with the process…
Serious enough to necessitate a re-vote? Perhaps. But even a re-vote–though complex, disappointing, and not cheap–would be far preferable to having a bunch of “outsiders” simply signing off on a process that a substantial proportion of Afghans consider to be flawed, and therefore rebel against, plunging the country even deeper back into its long-entrenched series of conflicts…
Also, an election unfairly “thrown” to Karzai by an all-outsider commission might well inaugurate a process of continuing consolidation in Afghanistan of an increasingly authoritarian, US-dominated regime.
As the old democratization mantra goes: what you’re aiming for is not simply “one person, one vote, one time”, but rather the institutionalization of the whole democratic way of doing things… Including transparency, honesty, tolerance, real accountability to the citizenry, etc etc. All of which principles would be deeply violated if the new election-judging body throws the election to Karzai unfairly.
Anyway, what happens from here on with the Afghan vote has wide repercussions… not just in Afghanistan but also in Iraq and even the US.
Already, the doubt over the whole voting process October 9 has denied the Bushites the “clean victory for democracy” that they’d hoped to have in hand before November 2 when they insisted, earlier this year, that “ready or not” Afghans should hold their election in early October… But I’m sure that won’t stop George ‘W stands for for wired-up doll’ Bush from crowing about the Afghans’ amazing democratic achievements at every possible opportunity.
By the way, we just got our broad-band back here. Yay!