It's Getting Harder to Believe in Afghanistan

The first time I visited Afghanistan, two years ago, the presidential election of 2009 was already the most important date on the horizon. Well, nobody was entirely sure whether it would be in 2009 or 2010. But they knew it would matter big time. If it went well, Afghanistan’s deliverance from 30 years of near-constant internecine carnage would be accelerated greatly. If not, not.

Here’s how it went. The New York Times reported on Tuesday that a week before the election, the members of a southern tribe decided they had had enough of Hamid Karzai and they preferred his leading challenger, Abdullah Abdullah. But they never got to vote for him because Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, threw the governor of Shorbak, the tribesmen’s district, in jail and shut down all of its polling stations. Then the district police stuffed ballot boxes until Shorbak had returned nearly 30,000 votes for Karzai.