Supporters of Afghan presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah protest
the theft of yet another election in the country. Will Afghanistan
be the
next country to be plunged into an existential crisis?
Afghan Election 'Disaster' Imperils U.S. Presence (Saudi Gazette,
Saudi Arabia)
"The audit was supposed to sort out the mess, but now the Independent Election Commission has suspended its work due to, it says, a 'misunderstanding.' It isn't clear what has been misunderstood, but what is clear is that the continuing argument over who takes over imperils the country ... Ghani and Abdullah are handing the Taliban on a platter both a political and a propaganda victory. It is a disaster."
Afghanistan's
two presidential candidates, AshrafGhani and Abdullah Abdullah, are
placing their country in ever greater danger, as they continue to dispute the
result of the election.
U.S.
Secretary of State John Kerry persuaded the two men to cease their confrontation
over the result, while the eight million votes are audited for fraud, which
both sides allege has been committed. The provisional result made Ghani the winner, but Abdullah claimed there had been
widespread fraud in distant rural areas. Ghani's
supporters, meanwhile, asserted that their rival's people stuffed ballot boxes
and sought to fix the outcome.
The
audit was supposed to sort out the mess, but now the Independent Election
Commission has suspended its work due to,
it says, a "misunderstanding." It isn't clear what has been
misunderstood, but what is clear is that the continuing argument over who takes
over from lackluster two-term President HamidKarzai imperils the country's political stability. The
longer one candidate refuses to concede, the more entrenched will be the views
of his supporters, and the harder it will be to reach a settlement.
Posted
By Worldmeets.US
In
other words, Afghanistan's latest brave attempt at democracy may well end in
disaster. An essentially alien concept sold to a traditional and conservative
society as a way of allowing the opinions of every Afghan to be reflected in
the government will be in ruins.
In
states with a long history of democracy, the clear solution to a close result
is to form a coalition administration in which, in the national interest, power
is effectively shared. That is of course not always the case. George W. Bush
scraped into the White House on the dubious result of electronic voting in a
single state. Moreover, the U.S. political system provides no real tradition of
shared power. Thus, unsatisfactory for many though Bush's victory was, the
political establishment rallied around the office of the presidency, if not
wholeheartedly behind the man who had scrambled into the White House.
The
only people to benefit from the Afghan presidential election chaos are the
Taliban. They sought, largely ineffectively as it turned out, to disrupt the
voting. Now, though, between them, Ghani and Abdullah
are handing the Taliban on a platter both a political and a propaganda victory.
It is a disaster.
In
addition, it perhaps demonstrates to increasingly cynical Afghan voters that their
lust for power is down to the likelihood that both men want so desperately to
get their hands on the levers of state, and to use them as Karzai
and his people have, to enrich themselves at the expense of their country.
There is, in fact, little difference between the policies of either candidate.
If
there's no settlement soon, there will be no one to sign the agreement to
extend the presence of American military forces by another year. Logistically,
U.S. forces need to plan to stay put or quit by December, and now, as they say,
there is a shrinking window of opportunity to stop the scheduled drawdown.
No
less worrying is that there is also shrinking window for the Afghan state to
maintain any sort of political stability, without which the Taliban will pose
an ever greater menace.
