'Ethno-democracy' in
Afghanistan By Kaveh Afrasiabi
Democracy is the counting of heads, instead
of breaking them, and therefore it is a
welcome development for a country ravaged by a quarter-century
of warfare when ballots and not bullets appear to have
the upper hand, no matter how deficient the process and
how fragile the democratic ties that may or may not bind
the next government together.
Afghanistan
was due to begin counting votes on Wednesday after rivals
of President Hamid Karzai said they had withdrawn
their rejection of the weekend presidential poll.
Preliminary exit polls suggest that Karzai will win by a
landslide.
With the future of
Afghanistan hanging in the balance, 16 candidates, including
a female, fielded the race, some simply to air
their frustrations with Karzai's government, some to
mobilize their respective constituencies largely along
ethnic lines, such as the Uzbek strongman General Abdul
Rashid Dostum, and some, such as the leading contender Yunus
Qanooni, a Tajik intellectual and former education
minister, seriously contemplating replacing Karzai and
thus managing a broader reach for the government beyond
Kabul and its surrounding enclaves.
From
the outset, Karzai was helped by his strong US
backing, his use of government resources for election
purposes, division among his opponents and, above all,
the predominant fear that should he be defeated by a
non-Pashtun candidate - he is Pashtun - this would spell
doom and gloom for Afghanistan's internal unity,
notwithstanding the Pashtun majority of the Afghan
population.
To his credit,
Karzai added to his electoral assets a shrewd
set of maneuvers, including his decision to choose the
brother of slain Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Masoud
as his running mate. This Masoud, riding on the warm
collective memory of his brother, narrowly escaped
an assassination attempt; married to the daughter of
Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani, the former post-Soviet
leader highly respected as a moral authority in
Afghanistan, the younger Masoud is simply one more reason Rabbani
threw his weight behind Karzai days prior to the
election. Equally important has been the support given
to Karzai by the amicable former king, Zahir Shah.
Simultaneously, Karzai's other bold move was to
replace the governor of Herat, Ismael Khan, and thus
send a strong signal about the drift of his policies if
elected. With provincial warlordism representing a major
source of government weakness, Karzai's bold move in
Herat has been a risky proposition that may backfire
should he fail to meet the ultimate objective of
demobilizing Khan's, and other warlords', militias, some
of whom have been put in charge of administering the
elections, much to the chagrin of opposition candidates
criticizing him precisely for his failure to live up to
the promise of integrating the militias into the army
and police, not to mention Karzai's eschewing any
substantive move to institutionalize party politics
through legal reform.
Indeed, both the ethnic
politics of opposition candidates and Karzai's own
initiatives clearly indicate that Afghanistan's "new
politics" is helplessly caught in the maelstrom of
volatile ethnic politics, with each of the dominant
groups - Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras - jockeying
for position and influence in the post-elections scene.
With the fear of ethnic politics running rampant, this
alone explains the stunning news on the eve of the
elections that Ahmad Wali Masoud, chairman of the
National Movement of Afghanistan (NMA - Nihzat-e Melli
Afghanistan), which includes many former mujahideen
fighters-turned politicians, had decided to endorse
Karzai's candidacy.
Qanooni may be disheartened
by this decision and we may soon witness the NMA's
breakup into splintering organizations, chiefly because
Qanooni has already established himself as a powerful
and credible politician with more than ethnic and
provincial appeal and, barring unforeseen developments,
is destined to play an important role in Afghanistan's
politics for the years to come. Qanooni's singular
contribution in transforming the mujahideen fighters
into an organized political group is his biggest asset,
almost guaranteeing a cabinet position for him in the
next government should he fall short of defeating
Karzai.
Turning to the con
sides of the elections, various reports indicate
that the government has exaggerated the number of
registered voters - perhaps by 5 million. The next
president of Afghanistan is, therefore, likely to be elected by
less than one-fourth to one-fifth of the population, some of whom
have reportedly registered under the threat of
hefty penalties: those who fail to register are fined up
to US$11. On the other hand, Afghan expatriates,
including some 700,000 in Pakistan and roughly half a million
in Iran, have registered in large numbers, and as yet it
is unclear what role or influence the host governments
have or will play in "remote manipulation" of the
elections.
But
of course, al-Qaeda and the Taliban represent the
biggest hurdles to the development of Afghanistan's
nascent democracy, and they have succeeded in
fomenting a crisis environment hampering electoral politics,
eg, forcing Karzai, after the unsuccessful attempt on his
life, to confine himself to the capital with only one
or two brief ventures beyond the city
limits. The much-dreaded Taliban "resurgence" is, in fact, one reason
a groupthink on the inadvisability of a runoff elections,
in case no one achieves the required 51% of votes,
emerged on the eve of the elections. Karzai's inability
to win, and win solidly, in the first
round would have serious (long-term) implications, not
only signifying the hollow basis of his support and
thus emboldening his opponents, but also raising the
possibility that a non-Pashtun candidate could win, which, as
stated earlier, in turn does not bode well for both the
health of Afghanistan's fragile ethno-democracy and also
for Afghanistan's wary neighbors.
Concerning the
latter, both Pakistan and Iran have seemingly resigned
themselves to a new term for Karzai, who has done rather
well in cultivating ties with Afghanistan's neighbors.
Pakistan, a longtime Taliban supporter forced by the
United States into the auxiliary role in the "war on
terror" campaign, has for the moment vested its hopes on
the economic and financial rewards of a stable
Afghanistan, given the long-sought goals of energy
pipelines from the Central Asia-Caspian basin transiting
through Afghanistan to Pakistan (whose ports and access
to open sea potentially compete with Iran over Central
Asian's energy routes).
Iran, on the other
hand, is keen on a stable Afghanistan that could
expand economic ties with Tehran, reabsorb the
refugees, prevent the Taliban's reassertion, continue
the agreement on shared use of the Hirmand River, and
launch a more aggressive campaign against the
burgeoning narcotics trade, which has exploded uncontrollably
over the past couple of years, posing serious problems
for Iran. Consequently, Iran has been willing to
tolerate Karzai's US sponsorship as long as the pool of
shared interests between the two countries remains
intact.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the
author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's
Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and "Iran's Foreign
Policy Since 9/11", Brown's Journal of World Affairs,
co-authored with former deputy foreign minister Abbas
Maleki, No 2, 2003. He teaches political science at
Tehran University.
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