Doubts over Afghan poll run-off

THE decision by Afghan president Hamid Karzai to back a run-off in the disputed elections has been hailed as a diplomatic victory by the international community.

But as main rival Abdullah Abdullah prepares to go head-to-head with Karzai in the new elections a week on Saturday, commentators, academics and former government ministers are voicing doubts about the potential success – and, indeed, the wisdom – of the move.

The rivals, however, are committed to sweeping away the fall-out from August's ballot and reaching a decisive conclusion.

"We have started preparing for a second round," Abdullah said. "The results show the need for a second round. We will let the Afghan people decide – I am committed to that."

But Abdullah has categorically denied reports he would invite Karzai into his government if he were successful.

The former foreign minister, said his intention in seeking the presidency was to bring change to the impoverished country, not to be "part of the same deteriorating situation". His optimism over the new ballot, however, flies in the face of August's evidence and the fact that it took prolonged diplomatic intervention before Karzai agreed to accept ballot totals that left him short of the 50 per cent needed to win outright.

Early election returns had shown Karzai far ahead of Abdullah. But a United Nations-backed panel invalidated almost one million of Karzai's votes – nearly a third of all those cast for him – on the grounds they were probably fraudulent.

For voters, the disputed election has cast a cloud over the country, which is facing an intractable guerrilla insurgency in the south and east. Yesterday, US troops were blamed for the death of four Afghan civilians, including two children and a woman, in southern Kandahar city after a military convoy opened fire on a vehicle.



With the run-off election agreed, officials have less than two weeks to roll out the vast apparatus of polling sites and voting machines across this rugged country.

Last time around, that same apparatus was hijacked to produce hundreds of thousands of fraudulent ballots. Western officials overseeing the August vote said as many as 800 polling sites existed in name only.

Jean MacKenzie, director of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in Afghanistan, sounded a pessimistic note, at odds with the backslapping that greeted Karzai's announcement last Tuesday. She has even expressed doubts over whether the 7 November poll would actually go ahead.

"The Afghan people are tired and disgusted and no second round is going to redeem the democratic process," she said.

"Chances are there will not be a second round; weather and logistics could easily combine to torpedo the effort. A run-off is in no-one's interests. The turnout is likely be minuscule – under 20 per cent – making any talk of government legitimacy more than a little absurd.

"Given an extremely low turnout in the south, Karzai could even lose, which would mean his supporters would feel the need to resort to fraud, albeit more skilfully this time."

Professor Ali Ahmad Jalali, of the National Defence University in Washington DC, served as the interior minister of Afghanistan from January 2003 to October 2005. He said: "The main challenge for the run-off is to get the disenfranchised Pashtuns into the electoral process.

"If this does not happen, the Taleban will use this in their propaganda to convince the population that the government not only does not care about them, but is in fact an alliance of non-Pashtun interests intent on oppressing them from Kabul."

Former CIA officer Bruce Riedel, who was chairman of US president Barack Obama's strategic review of policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan this year, offered a scathing assessment:

"We have to assume there will be fraud in the second round. The scale in the first – especially by President Karzai – was staggering: almost a million fraudulent votes for his ticket.

"A credible election outcome has to be the priority. We should also not assume the outcome based on round one. This is more unpredictable than many assume. A run-off is the best way forward now, but only if its results are credible."

Gilles Dorronsoro, an expert on Afghanistan, Turkey and South Asia said the choices for most Afghans in the run-off elections were so bleak that whoever wins will lack legitimacy. "Paradoxically, Hamid Karzai draws most of his votes from the Pashtun areas of the south and the east of the country, where his government is at its most unpopular," he said.

"This reinforces the growing alienation of the Afghans toward Kabul, and threatens to smother the nascent democratic government in its cradle."

The view of Gary Hart, a former Democratic senator and now adviser to the US Global Leadership Coalition, is equally bleak.

A member of the National Democratic Institute's observer group in the first round, he said: "It was patently obvious this nation of 33 million was a long way from the kind of stable democracy that can insure honest elections.

"There were at least four international observer groups, and, even then, massive fraud occurred.

The international community must make it clear to the incumbent Karzai government that it will be held accountable for the integrity of the run-off voting process. If the Karzai government tries manipulation again, it will sacrifice the confidence of the international community."