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To vote or not to vote
...
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON -
With only four months to go before scheduled elections
in Afghanistan in June, some experts are calling for the
elections to be put off until next year. A delay would
enable both international donors and the government of
Hamid Karzai to make greater progress in disarming the
warlords who still run most of the country and in
extending security to rural areas, they argue.
These experts fear that the challenges created
in preparing the country of some 28 million people for
an election will divert attention and scarce resources
from more important tasks, particularly in the security
realm.
But Karzai himself, apparently backed by
the administration of US President George W Bush,
appears determined to forge ahead, at least with
presidential elections that he and Washington believe
would give the central government greater legitimacy,
both internationally and inside Afghanistan.
"If
you hold no election at all," warned US ambassador
Zalmay Khalilzad in a Wednesday press briefing at the US
Institute of Peace (USIP) in Washington, in which he
participated via telephone from Kabul, "the crisis of
legitimacy could be severe".
"The current state
of mind is to hold elections come hell or high water,"
Afghanistan expert Barnett Rubin told Inter Press
Service on Wednesday. "The UN people [who are helping to
organize the elections] are working around the clock to
come up with a way that they can do that."
Under
the December 2001 Bonn Accord, agreed to after the
ousting of the Taliban government, both presidential and
parliamentary elections are supposed to take place no
later than mid-2004, and Karzai seems committed to this
schedule. But most elections experts, including many in
the UN, have said that while a presidential election
might still be doable, the kinds of preparations
necessary for parliamentary elections - such as setting
out final electoral boundaries, organizing political
parties, and even preparing ballots for dozens of
candidates in different parts of the country - are
probably impossible to achieve by June 21, the date for
which both elections have tentatively been set.
Khalilzad himself appeared to anticipate this
Thursday. "If every effort is made to hold parliamentary
elections, and a majority is satisfied that they could
not be held, and the UN supports that [view], then the
legitimacy issue will be satisfied."
But going
ahead with only presidential elections could exacerbate
tensions between the southern-based Pashtuns, who make
up Afghanistan's largest ethnic group, and the
collection of non-Pashtun minorities, including Tajiks,
Uzbeks and the Hazara that ousted the Pashtun-dominated
Taliban with the help of the United States in November
2001, says Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist and
Afghanistan specialist who also spoke at the USIP
briefing.
Because the minority groups are
themselves deeply divided, Karzai, an ethnic Pashtun who
is seen as having failed so far to reach out to the
northern groups, is certain to sweep the election and
might thus govern unchecked by a sitting parliament,
where minorities could exercise some influence.
"The Americans have underestimated the ethnic
polarization that resulted from the loya jirga,"
Rashid said, referring to the grand council of notables
that met in late December to ratify a new constitution.
"Is he going to be elected by the whole country or only
one ethnic group?" asked Rashid. "I find it very
dangerous."
Barnett agrees, at least in part. To
him, the success of any elections at this point in
Afghanistan's evolution depends most of all on whether
the results reflect a consensus among key elites with
sufficient confidence in the process to go along. "It is
easier to get consensus around a presidential candidate
if you had parliamentary elections at the same time
because the losers in the presidential election would
feel they at least have representation in the
parliament," he said.
"Presidential elections
will be seen as a kind of all-or-nothing thing in a
system where the level of trust in existing institutions
is practically non-existent." At the same time, Rubin
says that Karzai's concerns about the impact of a delay
on the perceptions of his legitimacy are real.
After the mujahideen defeated the Soviet-backed
government almost 15 years ago, an agreement among the
victorious groups to rotate power broke down when one
president refused to leave office, setting off a new
round of chaos and civil war that created the conditions
that brought the Taliban to power in 1996.
"If
elections are postponed without very convincing reasons,
it will degrade Karzai's legitimacy," said Rubin. "And
if the delay goes beyond September, elections will have
to wait until next year because of the winter weather.
They would need to hold another loya jirga to
approve the delay, which may be worth trying."
The key is likely to come late next month when
Karzai's government meets with its foreign donors in
Berlin. According to Rashid, European donors, who have
pledged much of the aid for Afghanistan's reconstruction
and elections, are highly skeptical about holding
elections in June. They are also resentful, Rashid said,
of Washington's domination of the process, and see the
push to hold elections as a US agenda tied in part to
Bush's desire to be able to point to success in
Afghanistan in his own re-election campaign in November.
"The perception that it [the agenda] is being set in
Washington is very widespread," he noted.
The
best "way out", argued Rashid, is for the donors in
Berlin to call for elections to be delayed until the
spring of 2005, while taking responsibility for failing
to follow through on their own previous promises of
money and troops for reconstruction and security, which
are necessary to ensure a successful process. "That lets
Karzai off the hook," he said, and would help reduce the
current polarization between the Pashtuns and the other
groups.
Delaying elections would also permit the
government and its international supporters to focus far
more on particularly urgent projects, which include
disarming militias, tackling the growing drug trade, and
deploying more troops to more towns and cities in the
countryside - all three of which are essential for
ensuring successful elections.
Horacio Boneo, a
former UN elections expert and senior USIP fellow,
agreed that premature elections, particularly those
carried out before substantial disarmament - as in
Angola and Liberia - are particularly risky. On the
other hand, he said: "I can't think of a single case
where delaying actions caused any major problems." He
cited, in particular, the example of Mozambique, where
elections were delayed for one year so that disarmament
could be substantially advanced.
(Inter Press
Service)
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