1 Boring Old Man

Karzai bows to calls for Afghanistan poll runoff
^{President accepts need for second round after fraud inquiry}
guardian.co.uk
by Jon Boone in Kabul, Ewen MacAskill in Washington, and Patrick Wintour
19 October 2009

Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, will bow to international pressure today and concede that he did not win a clear ­majority in Afghanistan’s bitterly contested election, and also accept there should be a second round of voting. Senior officials in Kabul said Karzai would resolve the political crisis that has developed over the widespread fraud in the August presidential election, after a frantic round of diplomatic manoeuvring led by John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate foreign affairs committee.

…

The documents published by the ECC showed many of the ballot boxes inspected by officials had voting papers all marked in a uniform way, or voting forms not folded in half, suggesting that they were never posted through the slot at the top of the ballot box. Among the evidence uncovered by the ECC were:

• More than 30 polling stations where 100% of the valid votes went to one candidate.
• A polling station where all the votes showed identical markings, none of the ballots was folded and all 600 votes went to one candidate, but they were recorded as votes for another candidate.
• In almost a third of the sample [92 polling stations], 100% of the papers had uniform markings. Another 69 polling stations recorded 75% of the ballots showing uniform markings.
• In 41 polling stations all of the ballot papers were not folded.

It was on the basis of those discoveries that the ECC ordered the IEC to invalidate percentages of each candidates’ vote, a complex method that has never before been used in an election where it might have a decisive impact. But one UN official said the amount of votes disqualified was only a "subset" of actual level of fraud which would have been discovered had the ECC widened its investigation. "We will never know the full extent of the fraud," the official said.

A senior diplomatic source said Karzai had been talked round by ultimatums from world leaders, including Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, Gordon Brown and Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general who made clear that if he did not back down he would "be working outside the constitution and would no longer be a partner of the west".

About the only thing that has worked is the Operation part. We still have an Operation, sure enough. But the Enduring Freedom piece looks shaky. The voter fraud seems massive – essentially stuffed Ballot Boxes. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the dapper President, Hamid Karzai, was somehow involved in this fraud – maybe behind it. It reminds me of the bizarre regimes we supported in South Viet Nam – Madame Nu comes to mind.

In the waning days of the Bush Administration, we thought of our war in Afghanistan as "the good war." I doubt that there is such a thing as a "good war," but what we were saying was that it was, at least, a "just war" as opposed to our War in Iraq. Certainly, going after al Qaeda was the right thing to do, and fighting the Taliban was likewise sensible for our own National Security. But we’ve been there for eight years, and the result is a "thrown" election. Our presence, money, loss of life, and vigilance hasn’t gone very far in establishing a functional democracy. The same thing is true in Iraq. And we’ve probably witnessed another version of a manipulated democracy nearby in Iran.

We’ve been operating for the last eight years under a philosophy concocted in the first Bush Administration. The premise was that after the fall of the Soviet Union, we were uniquely placed to become the world’s sole superpower. In that role, we would police the world and actively promote our form of government. The Afghanistan story is why that was as bad an idea as it was in South Viet Nam years before.

Churchill was right when he quipped, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." It’s the default choice when a country finally figures out that absolute power corrupts absolutely, no matter how lofty its beginnings. Democracy is simply the best way there is to keep that from happening. The neoconservative notion of Evangelic Democracy was misguided, and impossible to achieve – a utopian musing can be filed alongside the Edsel, flagpole sitting, and New Coke. Countries come to democracy on their own and then struggle with it until the end of time. That’s just how it is. That’s what we’re doing, and it’s hard work.

Calling our military operation in Afghanistan Operation Enduring Freedom struck me as odd from the start. It really should have been Operation go after al Qaeda because they attacked America. Maybe if we had kept our focus on that mission, we wouldn’t be stuck with the impossible situation we find ourselves in today. I’m impressed that our new leaders haven’t fallen for the holy war concept, and are reticent to pursue this war aggressively if there’s no legitimate government to support.