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Democracy in the Muslim world is sometimes said to be a matter of "one man, one vote—one time." Tomorrow's presidential election in Afghanistan, the second since the Taliban were overthrown in 2001, is a useful reminder that the line does not qualify as some kind of iron rule of history.
Much has gone wrong in Afghanistan. The insurgency is resilient, security has deteriorated, coalition casualties are rising, NATO's performance has disappointed, Afghan authorities are by turns incompetent or corrupt, the situation for women has worsened, poppy fields are in bloom. In the last week, Kabul has been struck by two car bombings, while mortar shells landed near Hamid Karzai's presidential palace.
Often lost in this depressing litany is the fact that Afghanistan's (non-drug) GDP has grown robustly in the past four years. Though the insurgency has recently shown signs of spreading beyond the provinces bordering Pakistan, most of the country remains relatively secure. The Afghan national army is beginning to take shape as an effective fighting force, and could soon take over in restive Helmand province.
Afghans also still think enough of their democracy that about 16 million have registered for tomorrow's vote, some 38% of whom are women (short of the ideal, we know, but a considerable improvement over Taliban days). The four leading contenders—in a field of 41—are all pro-Western and basically secularist in orientation. They have campaigned vigorously and publicly, and appeared in televised debates. Though President Karzai remains the favorite to win, he is polling below the 50% threshold he needs to avoid a run-off, likely against his former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah.
None of this is incidental to the country's ability to defeat the insurgency. The Taliban think enough of the election that they have threatened to cut off the ink-stained finger of the voters. "In a counterinsurgency situation, where much of the contest between the insurgents and the counterinsurgent forces is about manipulating perceptions of the population, even such a tactical loss for the Taliban as the elections being basically peaceful, would provide an important break from a steady string of Taliban psychological successes over the past two years," notes Afghan analyst Vanda Felbab-Brown of the Brookings Institution. Hence the recent attacks in Kabul.
Beyond the threat of the Taliban, the poll is likely to be marred by the usual failings of elections in developing countries (and some Chicago precincts), including ballot stuffing and other forms of fraud, though some 160,000 monitors have been recruited to observe the vote. Afghanistan is not blessed by its ethnic divisions and rivalries that largely determine voting patterns and often prevent politicians from making decisions, or appointments, based on the merits alone.
That last fact goes partly toward explaining the disappointments of Mr. Karzai's last four years in office, such as the political rehabilitation of nasty warlords like the Uzbek Rashid Dostum. But Mr. Karzai has mainly himself to blame for ignoring serious allegations of corruption in his government and family, for his political dalliances with religious extremists, and for his feckless denunciations of coalition forces, on whose sacrifices his government depends.
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