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WEEKLY
SECTIONS |
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| Down to the wire |
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Monday, September 14, 2009
The melodrama that is the Afghan elections is grinding towards the final act. There has been much speculation that the scale of fraud and corruption within the electoral process is as large as to invalidate Hamid Karzais’ victory but the US envoy to Afghanistan says…”Don’t jump to conclusions.” Richard Holbrooke is saying that the independent election commission must be allowed to complete its work before any judgment about the poll or the victor; and that a rerun of the elections is not a viable option – which brings into question the legitimacy of any future Karzai presidency at just about every level. Even allowing for the fact that there was a presupposition that the elections were going to be flawed it is difficult to see how, if the election commission finds fraud on a scale which takes the Karzai vote below fifty per cent, he can govern with any hope of his mandate being accepted. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband has weighed in with his own view; largely supportive of Holbrooke and speaking to the BBC he said that he felt that ‘a fair result can be achieved.’
One wonders if these men exist in some sort of parallel universe which has a reality separate to that which we perceive in our own celestial incarnation. ‘A fair result can be achieved’ Mr Miliband? Just how do you deduce that from the available evidence? The election commission has now invalidated results from seventy polling stations in the south and east of the country, where nearly all of the votes were cast for Karzai. The commission has ordered recounts at many other polling stations. There are reliable reports from NGOs working on the election that ‘ghost’ polling stations operated widely, again harvesting Karzai votes. Women were mostly excluded from the vote and there are innumerable reports of multiple voting by individuals resulting in a more than 100 per cent turnout in some areas. This election was not just flawed, Messrs Holbrooke and Miliband, its goose was well and truly cooked. Holbrooke has drawn the line in the sand that is a virtual guarantee of a Karzai victory no matter what the election commission eventually reports – and investigations into irregularities are going to take several months. Whoever the Americans and the British and the other sponsors of this exercise in how-not-to-run-an-election decide has won when the dust has settled, we may be certain that the people of Afghanistan lost it.
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ISSN 1563-9479 
