Karzai's fraud scheme could backfire By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - Afghanistan's presidential election on Thursday has long been
viewed by United States officials as a key to conferring legitimacy on the
Afghan government, but evidence that Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his
powerful warlord allies have planned to commit large-scale electoral fraud
could have the opposite effect.
Two US-financed polls published during the past week showed support for Karzai
was well short of the 51% of the total vote necessary to avoid a runoff
election. A poll by Glevum Associates showed Karzai at 36%, and a survey by the
International Republican Institute had him at 44% of the vote.
Those polls suggest that Karzai might have to pad his legitimate vote total by
a significant amount to be certain of being elected in
the first round. Preliminary results were expected to be announced in Kabul on
Saturday, according to the Associated Press.
But Karzai has been laying the groundwork for just such a contingency for many
months. He has forged political alliances with leading Afghan warlords who
control informal militias and tribal networks in the provinces to carry out a
vote fraud scheme accounting for a very large proportion of the votes.
Karzai chose Muhammad Qasim Fahim, the ethnic Tajik warlord who was vice
president and defense minister in Karzai's Afghan Transitional Administration
until the 2004 elections, as his running mate. In return for their support, he
promised Hazara warlords Haji Muhammad Moheqiq and Karim Khalili that new
provinces would be carved out from largely Hazara districts in Ghazni and
Wardak provinces, as reported by Richard Oppel of the New York Times.
The socio-political structure of Afghanistan remains so hierarchical that
warlords can deliver very large blocs of votes to Karzai by telling their
followers to vote for him, and in some provinces - especially in the Pashtun
south - by forcing local tribal elders to cooperate in voter fraud schemes.
The system in which warlords pressure tribal elders to deliver the vote for
Karzai was illustrated by a village elder in western Herat province who said he
had been threatened by a local commander with "very unpleasant consequences" if
the residents of his village did not vote for Karzai, according to the
Institute for War and Peace Reporting.
As early as last May, the country's independent election monitoring
organization, the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan (FEFA), had
documented a variety of voter registration practices that laid the groundwork
for massive voter fraud.
FEFA observers, who witnessed voter registration in 194 of 400 voting
registration centers in four provinces during one stage of the process, found
that nearly 20% of the voters registered, on average, were underage - in many
cases as young as 12 years old.
It is now estimated that 17 million voter registration cards have been issued,
which means that nearly 3.5 million cards may have been issued to children.
FEFA observers also found rampant distribution of multiple voting cards. During
the third phase of registration, they observed at least four incidents of such
abuses in 85% of the centers. The voter registration staff was seen handing out
cards even before applicants had been registered.
In one case, the FEFA observers saw about 500 voting cards being given to a
single individual.
Another element in the fraud scheme involves the registration of women without
their actually being physically present, often on the basis of lists of names
given to the registration officials. The list system for registering women was
found in 99% of registration stations in Paktika province and 90% of those in
Zabul and Khost provinces.
During the final phase of the registration, many centers were found to be
allowing males to take the registration books home, where they supposedly
obtained the fingerprints of the women.
In some of the most insecure and traditional provinces, such as Logar and
Nuristan, more than twice as many cards were issued to women as to men in 2009;
and in Paktika, Paktia and Khost, 30% more women were registered than were men.
In Kandahar, women represent 44% of those with voting cards. Fawzia Koofi, a
young female member of parliament, told The Australian newspaper that such
levels of women registered could not be genuine.
The result has been to create a vast pool of voting cards, very few of which
will be used by women to vote.
Reports by journalists about the acquisition of voting cards by the local
strongmen indicate that this distribution of voting cards to people who would
not vote was part of a plan to stuff the ballot boxes to increase the vote for
Karzai.
The Times of London quoted a tribal elder in Marja district of Helmand province
last week as saying that the warlord and former governor Sher Mohammad
Akhudzada was organizing the vote for Karzai in the province, and that he and
other tribal elders were responsible for buying voting cards from voters who
had registered.
Independent analyst Alex Strick van Linschoten, who is based in Kandahar, has
reported schemes using police to purchase voter registration cards in several
districts in the province.
Writing in the New York Times magazine on August 9, Elizabeth Rubin reported
that an unnamed political figure in Kandahar told her in June he had
manufactured 8,000 voter "fake" registration cards that had sold for US$20
each.
Some observers believe that various factors may constrain Karzai's effort to
use warlords to swing the election. Former US ambassador to Afghanistan Ronald
E Neumann told Inter Press Service (IPS) he was counting on the use of
indelible ink on the voters' fingers to make it impossible for people to vote
more than once.
He recalls, however, that the "indelible" ink used in the 2005 election turned
out to be washable after all.
Neumann also hopes the existence of the Election Complaints Commission, an
independent body with three international members nominated by the United
Nations, will be a check on massive vote fraud.
That body investigates complaints of voter fraud and has the right under Afghan
election law to order the invalidation or recounting of votes or even the
conducting of new polling where it finds evidence of fraud. But it has no
sub-national presence and will be heavily dependent on the Independent
Electoral Commission (IEC), which handles all the documentary evidence
pertaining to such complaints.
More problematic is the fact that the IEC is not "independent" of the Karzai
regime at all. Its seven members were all appointed by Karzai, and its chairman
has made no secret of his partisan support for the president.
The IEC will likely seek to cover up complaints of major fraud, and the
complaints body may not be able to do much about it.
Neumann put the odds of an election that would be "good enough" in the eyes of
the Afghans at "50-50".
But counter-insurgency specialists are more pessimistic. Larry Goodson of the
US Army College, who was on the US Central Command team that worked on a
detailed plan for Afghanistan and Pakistan earlier this year, told IPS, "The
reality is there is going to be a lot of cheating and fraud."
Goodson said the danger for the United States in the Karzai election plan is
that it "could be perceived by Afghans as promoting the legitimization of
someone who is widely perceived as illegitimate".
Australian counter-insurgency specialist David Kilcullen, who will shortly
become a senior adviser to General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US and
North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces in Afghanistan, declared at the US
Institute of Peace on August 6, "The biggest fear is Karzai ends up as an
incredibly illegitimate figure, and we end up owning Afghanistan and propping
up an illegitimate government."
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US
national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils
of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published
in 2006.
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