The only thing that really matters about the presidential election held in Afghanistan yesterday was whether it will generate a nationwide government that has enough political credibility with the country’s 33 million people that it is able to govern.
This seems to be in severe question. And the question may not be answered for many weeks, or even months, yet.
From this point of view, the statement Obama made yesterday lauding the election as a success was both (a) beside the point and (b) inappropriate. Oh, and also distinctly (c) premature.
It is not for him, the president of the foreign country occupying Afghanistan, to declare the election a success. It is for the Afghans. That is, if we are all to believe the official US narrative about Afghanistan now being a “sovereign nation” in which the US and other NATO forces are deployed just to help the Afghan government…
There are two major ways (and a host of lesser ways) in which the election could fail to generate a “credible enough” government.
Firstly, the whole process of voting may be judged by Afghans to be non-credible, as evidenced either by very low turnout or by widesread and credible reports of voter fraud.
It may well be possible that the recorded turnout among the 15-16 million registered voters was so low– due to the intimidation of the anti-government insurgents, disillusion with the governing system, or other factors– that the whole voting exercise is inherently non-credible.
We should know that when we gain an idea of raw turnout numbers, apparently tomorrow.
Or, the turnout figures may be sufficiently high to allow for credibility– but the reports of fraud could be so widespread and credible that even (or perhaps especially) those high raw turnout numbers don’t look credible.
Secondly, even if the voting process has some initial credibility, the reported results of either yesterday’s first round or the runoff that mandated in the event of no clear winner could come under serious contest from one or more of the losers…
We are seeing before our very eyes, in Iran, the debilitating effect that such a contest to electoral legitimacy can have on a governance system.
I imagine, though, that the US military will not allow a prolonged-deadlock situation to go on very long in the event of a contest arising in Afghanistan… And they will intervene in some way… But of course, that would only undermine the legitimacy of the resulting president even more!
But anyway, let’s say that Hamid Karzai or Abdullah Abdullah manages to emerge as the winner after a first or second round, and this victory meets with no immediate serious contestation from other candidates. Then, the lucky winner goes and forms a government…. that does what?
Well, one thing I’m assuming it can almost immediately do is sit astride a rather bloated stream of foreign (US-mobilized) funding. Which it then gets to deploy. Yoohoo! (Why do you think most of these guys are runnng in these elections, anyway?)
But will it be able to provide enough basic services– including that most vital government service of all, pubic security– to enough Afghans to be able to keep and expand its legitimacy?
Who know? The odds look rather grim..
Bottom line, though: It is far too early to call yesterday’s election a “success”– for any of the candidates, or for the process itself.
… By the way, I’ve been pretty disappointed so far in the AfPak Channel of news and commentary that Foreign Policy mag and the New America Foundation got up and running a couple of weeks ago.
Maybe it’s still early days for the people there. But if you want a good, up-to-date source on the election that aggregates news and reports from a wide range of sources, then Wikipedia’s page “Afghan presidential election, 2009” looks far, far better to me.
It provides an amazing range of excellent links. Including one to this great August 19 piece by my fellow IPS contributor Gareth Porter.
Gareth quoted former US ambassador to Afghanistan Ron Neumann as saying that the odds of the election tending up as “good enough” in the eyes of the Afghans was “50-50”.
He also quoted Australian COIN specialist David Kilcullen as saying, “The biggest fear is Karzai ends up as an incredibly illegitimate figure, and we end up owning Afghanistan and propping up an illegitimate government.”
Chapeau, Gareth!
19 thoughts on “Does Afghanistan’s election matter? How, exactly?”
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The only thing that really matters about the presidential election held in Afghanistan yesterday was whether it will generate a nationwide government that has enough political credibility the country’s 33 million people that it is able to govern.
Its very obvious its very important matter for US to set a political native face been behind that face.
Its really there is no concerns at all for country’s 33 million people in Afghanistan or those country’s 20 million people in Iraq.
Most important is US interests in both countries.
Please give us a break of these mangling statements and analysing occupation and illegal
wars on millions of innocents in name of freedom democracy then coming with peace activism….
The ‘Legitimacy’ in question has nothing to do with Afghanistan. No government ‘elected’ in this manner could ever be legitimate in Afghanistan with it federal traditions and its loya jirga institutions.
Had NATO any respect for the Afghans it would have facilitated a tried and true taditional process.
But is has no such respect: the election is all about constructing a faux narrative to be sold to the ‘west’s ideological castes and then packaged to pass muster among the taxpayers.
The ‘election’ tactic is the other side of the ‘colour’ revolution coin, a garish misrepresentation of the desire in all of us to manage our own affairs and to make our own history.
Both are impossible under imperialism but fake elections, like pre-packaged uprisings vaulting CIA assets into power, help to pass the time and distract the punters from what is really happening: their heads are being kicked in and their pockets are being emptied.
And the task of the candidates is to justify their acquiescence in this shameful humiliation.
NATO has become the Piranha Brothers in an extended Monty Python sketch: now it is up to Messrs Abdullah and Karzai to explain to the world how happy they are, personally, and how delighted their people are, to be plundered, bombed, imprisoned, tortured and treated like unattractive orphans.
And then, when their societies are comprehensively destroyed, and their cultures uprooted, they will be left alone, for a while to internalise the death of their nation.
No, the only thing that matters today is the Lybian PAN AM bomber release…
[etc etc… Titus is once again seeking to capture this blog for his own purposes with a whole series of hyperbolic claims. Other commenters are asked to please not feed this troll.]
Bevin, it’s unusual, but now I have disagreed with you twice in succession. The last time was when you fed the troll Titus.
This time it is about democracy and voting. The people who go to vote in an election should be respected. It is not the point as to how phony and bourgeois the election is, or whether only a minority pitch. The people who subjectively take themselves down to the polling station, mark the paper, and put it in the box, are the salt of the earth. All bourgeois elections are haunted by ghouls, vultures and snake-oil salesmen, but life must proceed in spite of the predators and the scavengers, not so?
As for the institutions of feudalism that you praise, really Bevin, you conjure up visions of us all making a virtue of meeting in a boggy flood plain like Runnymede. How have people forgotten the horrible nature of feudalism? It would be harder for you to forget if you were closer to the real thing (e.g. Swaziland).
Still another compelling quote from the Porter piece from Larry Godson of the US Army War College:
The elections…. “could be perceived by Afghans as promoting the legitimization of someone who is widely perceived as illegitimate.”
Porter must have struggled not to make the Vietnam parallels….
(meanwhile, yes, we have various US players arguing that we — yes, the good ole’ usa — should be careful not to “legitimize” Ahmadinejad in Iran — e.g., by merely negotiating w/ his gov’t….)
Notice how Time Mag manages to spin the bad (lack of election legitimacy) to a good….
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1918110,00.html
“An election outcome that puts a question-mark over the legitimacy of the next president could, paradoxically, actually suit the U.S. purpose. That’s because Afghanistan’s current system of government, in U.S. thinking, requires the proverbial re-break and reset in order to create a regime sufficiently responsive and accountable to its own citizenry to give the counterinsurgency campaign a better chance of defeating the Taliban.”
Right….. and so that’s what the purpose of even having the elections was — to fail at their stated task so we can get to the un-stated task of re-breaking bones?
Domza,
I’m not sure whether you mis-read Bevin’s “federalism” as “feudalism” or were being ironic. If the latter, I think it misplaced.
The traditional system he points to may be far from perfect – no vote for women beyond the limited possibilities within the household being a glaring negative – but the village and provincial Shura’s do send representatives toward the center to become partners in a very distinct federal system.
It’s interesting to note that in Afghanistan we want to prevent this kind of regional autonomy whilst in Iraq we sought to impose it through an inappropriate constitution brute force.
I think Bevin has a point.
There is nothing ironic about it, Steve. Afghanistan is a pre-capitalist, feudal country and the nature of a feudal country is what Bevin is now calling “traditionally federal”. The Loya Jurga was an institution of feudalism whereby the feudal barons express their relationship to the King and vice versa. It’s simply absurd to dignify feudalism with the honorific reverentialism that goes together with the word “traditional” in the late, shame-faced years of capitalism, when the bourgeoisie has lost its direction.
I don’t know about “we”. I am not one of your “we”. I am South African, a place where there has been a titanic struggle for the vote, and where feudalism was part of the previous repressive mix. What I know is that if people vote, then they deserve respect, and a lot more respect than rotten feudalism deserves.
Titus’s outrage expressed as:-
” No, the only thing that matters today is the Lybian PAN AM bomber release as it shows that the superficial wisdom of fighting terrorism as regular crime does not work.
I am surprise the whole diplomatic world is up in arms and Helena deletes my posts on this topic.”
Needs some remedial reminding in that those responsible for killing 290 humans including 66 children, aboard a US Navy cruiser the USS Vincennes in 1988, in an Iran Air AirBus ‘WHICH WAS MISTAKEN FOR AN F14 TOMCAT’ (& people believed this BS) were NEVER brought to justice or incarcerated.
Titus. The days when some one like you can strut around and claim like this rabbi did….”One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.” —Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, Feb. 27, 1994 are quickly passing into the good old days.
Domza,
Apologies for the gratuitous “we”. Perhaps it should be You?
It’s all very well sweeping away tradition when it doesn’t fit the desired end-state but to replace it with a centralized feudalism that eliminates the checks and balances of local selection processes, what are you delivering?
A vote is all well and good when it delivers legitimate representation of ones aspirations (or some approximation) but when it just provides a funnel through which to pour desperately needed development investment in a way that may satisfy the obsolete trickle down ideology of the “donor” but fails to meet the needs of the supposedly intended recipient, what’s a vote actually worth?
Feudalism is both federal and centralist. Feudalism is gangsterism. Feudal lords are war-lords. There is no other kind.
Checks and balances are not God-given but are an Anglo-US invention which lots of us hate having imposed upon us.
Freedom is not a “desired end-state”. The act of voting is an act of freedom. A vote does not “deliver”. A vote is a voice, stem, bua, life.
I know what I mean, and I know my history in practice and in theory of a kind that I share with large numbers of fellow-humans and with many previous generations, as witnessed by their works, particularly in print.
Yours is a peculiar cocktail of “delivery”, “development investment” and other transitory jargons with which one is all too familiar in my part of the world, although unable to find historical or practical meaning in them.
In my opinion, so long as you are all driven by “deliverables” and “desired end-states”, and have no understanding of history, then the slaughter is going to continue. The slaughter is driven by reference to an ahistorical altruism that all of the “Western” interventionists now appeal to, just as you do, Steve.
I’m not sure why you mark me an interventionist. I’m not.
So, correct me if I’m wrong but for you, a vote is a thing so abstract that to cast it is all that matters?
Doesn’t it matter at all why you cast it? For who? On no expectation whatsoever?
That seems like a very fine political theory but in the context of Afghanistan is divorced from the reality of their current situation.
Who or what did the Afghans vote for yesterday? What was the necessity of that election? Was it really any more than a proxy referendum to give percentage results to the populations of US and Nato countries along with an admonition to “stay the course”, defeat the “bad guys”?
You cannot just ignore the external forces and interests – few of which intersect with the real needs of the Afghan people – that are being played out in this process. A vote in Afghanistan today is most valuable, not when it’s cast but when it’s withheld.
Just one more question Domza.
If you were an Afghan – with all that entails – which of the Warlord enabling stooges would have received your vote yesterday?
I’m a South African, not an Afghan. I vote in South Africa. I don’t ask anybody’s help when I am in the voting booth. I respect anybody who takes that responsibility, here or in any other country. A voter is not a feudal. You must learn to distinguish between the voter and the choice that is on offer, in my opinion, and to respect the voter. This is what I have been saying all along. It is what I want you to hear, and not some other thing. Respect the voters, be they ever so few. If their choice is hard, respect them more.
That’s a very aloof and abstract position that ignores the fact that the voter and his rights have already been undermined by outside intervention and manipulation of the electoral system.
So, let me put the question another way: would you have voted in the 1994 elections if your choice of candidate were defined by outside powers or interests?
The voter is not aloof, Steve. I can’t see why you cannot place yourself at the standpoint of the voter, and comprehend the voter as a Subject, in the philosophical (and not the feudal) sense. Why can’t you?
As a matter of fact I did vote in the 1994 elections in South Africa, and in three more national and three local authority elections since then. For your information the situation in 1994 in terms of candidates was rough, and it is still not much better. The Parliamentary and the Provincial elections are 100% PR (proportional representation) so the candidates are not on the ballot paper. The Presidential candidates are known, but not directly voted for.
One could go on. There are no perfect elections, Steve. Bourgeois-democratic elections are always messy. The best system is the one advocated by Karl Marx in “The Civil War in France”, a work about the Paris Commune, and endorsed by Lenin in “The State and Revolution”. In other words, the best Subject is a revolutionary subject, naturally.
It is precisely because of all of the double-dealing and the sleight of hand in your average bourgeois-democratic election, that the voter’s act of will is so priceless. It is the saving grace.
Now, don’t be a bore, Steve. I’ve said the same thing enough times in different words for you. If you don’t understand me by now, well it’s just too bad.
But I do understand you Domza, I just think you’re wrong in the case of the Afghan elections. As I said above and will now repeat for you; the Afghan presidential elections are more a western referendum by proxy designed to keep the Afghan’s at the wrong end of a Nato bayonet for another few years while all those clever people in Washington, London and other comfy places, work out how to extract themselves without appearing to have “lost”.
But you still didn’t answer my question.
Talking about Afghan’s warlord….
Blue burqas election
Omop writes:
Titus. The days when some one like you can strut around and claim like this rabbi did….”One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.” —Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, Feb. 27, 1994 are quickly passing into the good old days.
Omop, you know prices and exchange rates are judged by actual transaction in the market, not by what some Rabi or your Imam says.
Well, the last transaction shows that one Arab prostate is worth 270 western civilian lives, before that there was the Hizbolla transaction equating two Israeli corpses for twelve live Lebanese terrorists, and of course veteran bazaar bargainers from Hamas are asking I think two thousand Palestinians for one Israeli soldier in captivity sans Red CRoss visits.
Let’s watch the ultimate bargainers of Tehran to see what price they ask for the three American backpacker/journalists from Berkeley.
Prices as you see may vary, but the fact remains that FBI has seen the need to monitor an penetrate mosques, and that is a first for any religion, peace loving or not.