No one’s sure yet how many Afghans voted in the elections, or where, or for whom. With a tenth of the vote counted, it will take weeks or more to work out whether President Karzai has been re-elected or whether Abdullah Abdullah, his leading rival, has beaten him. Or, come to that, whether no candidate won more than 50 per cent and everyone will have to run the whole exercise again in a second round in October.
But it’s good all the same that the elections took place, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is arguing trenchantly. Everyone knew that the polls would be “rough and ready”, said Mark Sedwill, the Ambassador in Kabul. Violence “was at the lower end of our expectations”, he added, while quickly paying tribute to British troops killed in the run-up.
Good luck to him and those trying to maintain an upbeat tone. It’s hard to join them. Not that the picture is entirely black. But the elections, however imperfect, may still look more attractive than the president they produce.
Sedwill, direct, low key, thoughtful, did not dismiss the difficulties of the elections in a press conference live from Kabul by video link yesterday. He managed to sound noncommittal rather than evasive in a new “Ask the Ambassador” ordeal devised by Whitehall, in which he answered e-mail questions from the public (including carefully chosen gems such as whether the British media focused too much on military deaths and too little on what Britain was doing to rebuild Afghanistan). Perhaps it was more painful for the audience — like The Office grafted on to Yes, Minister.
Behind this self-conscious pursuit of accessibility, however, is a serious point: the Government’s discomfort in justifying Britain’s role in Afghanistan, as military casualties rise, and after Admiral Mike Mullen, the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared the situation to be “deteriorating”. Do these elections warrant the casualties?
The encouraging points are these: both Karzai and Abdullah tried to win over voters beyond their ethnic blocs. The Afghan security forces surpassed expectations (which were not high) in enabling voters to get to the polls. The Electoral Complaints Commission (the title does have an unshakeably fanciful sound in the Afghan context) appears to be seriously investigating complaints. There are more than 200 of those, of which 30 or 40 could have a bearing on the outcome, said Sedwill.
Against that you have the endless anecdotes of corruption, fraud and intimidation — “everything from losing ballot papers to the way officials behaved on the day”, said Sedwill. There are many reports of low turnout although some have been revised upwards.
Most troubling, however, is that Karzai remains a problematic leader, willing to bend to warlords and extreme religious factions to keep power. Abdullah, popular in the Tajik north, might divide the country even more. This painful exercise in democracy is not about to give Afghans a great, unifying leader.
Stability, moving the country forward a generation, running messy elections that still can be called legitimate — these were the aims that Sedwill spelled out yesterday. That’s a big reduction of ambition in eight years and it still looks a tough call.
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