A Victory for Democracy
Afgans went to the polls yesterday to elect a new President. Vote-counting is underway; it may be days before the result is clear, and it is widely thought a further run-off election on May 28 will be required, given the splitting of the vote among the eight contenders. But any one of the three front-runner candidates - Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister who nearly won the last election in 2009, Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, an academic, a former finance minister and World Bank official, and Zalmai Rassoul, also a former foreign minister - will be better than the mercurial Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan's outgoing President. More on this in a moment.
The remarkable story is that the election occurred at all. In the week leading up to Saturday's vote, escalating,Taliban-inspired violence in Kabul and throughout the country necessitated the deployment of thousands of Afghan security forces at strategic buildings and mosque squares; hundreds of new checkpoints were set up, and thousands of vehicles were searched. Twenty-two tons of explosives and six landmines were seized in Takhar province before they could be used for bomb attacks at polling stations. Nonetheless, suicide bombers struck relentlessly, and many civilians were killed. Even the final candidates' debates scheduled to be televised last week had to be cancelled. Yet, in such an environment, voter enthusiasm could not be diminished - reports emerged of Afghans spending hours, even days, lining up to register to vote, triggering a last-minute rush for voter cards by citizens, many of whom had never voted in previous elections. Voter turnout hit a record, even though several polling centers could not open because of gunfire and rocket attacks. Stations ran out of ballots, and most were forced to remain open an extra hour. An estimated 7 million Afghans - men in traditional tunics and loose trousers and, notably for Afghanistan, some 2 million women, many clad in burqas - showed up, stood in segregated lines, often in the rain, and voted. The turnout ratio, at nearly 60 per cent of eligible voters, exceeded that of the last presidential election in America. Mindful of the widespread fraud during Karzai's re-election in 2009, electoral officials insist the extra measures they've taken this time - bar codes on the ballot boxes, for example - will prevent vote-rigging.
President Karzai is leaving office - he is constitutionally barred from running for a third term - at a time when America is withdrawing its combat troops, and when the Taliban still command support and sympathy from an estimated third of the population (mostly Pashtuns and others living in rural areas). He has refused to sign a security agreement with the United States which would maintain a US troop presence after 2014 - apparently to mitigate his image as an American puppet. Yet the country remains, at the very least, fragile. A new President will step into an economic and political environment of endemic poverty and official corruption - Transparency International ranks Afghanistan with Somalia and North Korea as the three most corrupt countries in the world - which Karzai has been impotent to change. It is reasonable, therefore, to ask whether the new President - even if more competent and honest - can contain a Pakistani-supported Taliban, with or without American assistance, and spark an era of economic development so crucial to the employment of the Taliban's biggest source of recruits - disaffected youth.
Afghanistan's election demonstrates a yearning for, even a faith in, representative government, moreover under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. This is a victory. The challenge for the new President will be to ensure that this outpouring by voters will be more than just a flare of hope, such that it develops into a functioning, sustainable movement that establishes individual rights and democratic institutions, and a President who respects both.