The April 5 presidential election in Afghanistan is a landmark event in that’s country’s political transition. But it is only part of a much longer and larger process and will not change the Afghan political scene overnight, either for the better or worse
Pre-occupied with the Lok Sabha vote at home, there has understandably been only limited focus in India on the landmark election that is coming up in the neighbourhood this weekend. On Saturday, April 5, Afghanistan will be going to the polls to elect itself a new President. This will be the country’s third presidential election after the fall of the Taliban, and its first without incumbent Hamid Karzai in the fray. Since he took charge in 2001, President Karzai has ably shepherded Afghanistan through a tumultuous and challenging decade of national transition but now stands constitutionally debarred from seeking a popular mandate for a third time, thereby leaving the race for the top job wide open.
Moreover, the election will also be played out against the drawdown of Western troops from that country even as the Taliban continue to gain strength — and to that extent, important questions about security and stability loom large. Many worry if Afghanistan will disintegrate into small fiefdoms held by tribal warlords while others fear the return of the Taliban to Kabul. The Taliban have, as expected, promised to disrupt the election which they consider to be an American ploy and some are of the opinion that the April 5 vote will fuel violence and bloodshed that will quickly undo the supposedly fragile gains made in the last decade. Viewed together, it is easy to see how this election can arguably be the single-most important political transition process in Afghanistan since the Bonn Conference.
On the plus side, there is much that seems to be going right. One, there is a high level of public support for the democratic process despite the security concerns. In the past two months, since the candidates began campaigning, they have held large public rallies that have been attended by hundreds. Ordinary Afghans have spent hours standing in lines outside their local election commission offices to register for voting cards and there is reason enough to believe that they will exercise their democratic rights on April 5. Even women are expected to participate in large numbers.
Two, there are as many as eight candidates in the race for President (supported by two vice presidential candidates each) and at least three of them — Mr Abdullah Abdullah, Mr Ashraf Ghani and Mr Zalmai Rassoul — are considered to be in a close fight. Mr Abdullah, a prominent Opposition figure who heads the National Coalition for Afghanistan, was a front-runner in the 2009 election as well but later withdrew from the run-off against President Karzai. Mr Ghani is a technocrat, a former World Bank employee with a doctorate from Columbia University and vast experience in the development sector. His performance in the 2009 election was lacklustre, but this time around, he is expected to put up a tough fight. Mr Rassoul was Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister until October 2013 when he resigned from his position to run for President. Previously, he had also served as National Security Adviser and now enjoys the official support of President Karzai. Overall, the candidates’ profiles offer a good indicator of how the Afghan polity has matured over the years even though President Karzai may still remain the tallest of Afghan politicians.
Three, Afghan authorities have clearly learnt from previous electoral experiences, and especially the two main bodies responsible for the conduct of free and fair elections — the Independent Election Commission and the Independent Electoral Complaints Commission — have taken several steps to rectify past problems. These range from ground-level management details, such as the use of bar codes to track the movement of ballot material, to larger policy issues such as the enactment of electoral laws by Parliament for the first time instead of a Presidential decree, as had been done during the presidential and parliamentary elections in 2004 and 2005 and then in 2009 and 2010 respectively.
But having said all of this, it is also equally important to understand the limitations of the April 5 vote. For this, let us go back through the previous points for a more nuanced view of the situation. In the first case, the popular enthusiasm for democracy notwithstanding, one cannot ignore the fact that the unsavoury electoral experience of 2009 left the Afghan public with a bitter aftertaste. Large-scale ballot rigging tarnished President Karzai’s mandate and it remains unclear to what extent the situation may have improved this time around. Yes, efforts have been made to make the voting system tamper-proof but the Afghan state still simply does not have the massive infrastructure needed to conduct free and fair elections, especially when faced with serious security challenges.
For example, the Afghan Analysts Network has reported that anything between seven to 10 million additional voter identification cards are floating around the country. Exact figures are impossible to collate as Afghanistan does not do a head count for its people. Voting cards have also been sold in bulk while for women voters in conservative areas, they have been issued to male members of their families without adequate identification proof.
In previous elections, village elders have been known to vote en masse for their people, booth capturing has been common, and ballots routinely tampered with. Now, there are private armed contractors available for hire to do the dirty work. Indeed, as Mr Abdullah said recently, his biggest challenger is not his rival candidate but electoral fraud. In Afghanistan, the point of debate is not if the results will be rigged — that is a given — but to what extent they will be manipulated.
Similarly, when it comes to presidential candidates, it may seem like there is a lot of choose from on paper, but, in reality, all the front-runners are Establishment insiders expected to continue with the Karzai consensus on most matters. Also, they all belong to the dominant Pashtun community. True, some of them have taken on minority leaders as their running mates, but that is either for window dressing purposes (as in the case of some of the women candidates) or cynical vote bank calculations (for example, the influential Uzbek leader Abdul Rashid Dostum, accused of war crimes, who has tied up with Mr Ghani).
As for the Taliban factor, it is again unlikely that the insurgents will disrupt the process entirely. There may be isolated attacks, such as the ones in Hotel Serena and the IEC headquarters but, overall, the status quo should hold. The Taliban have publicly called for boycotting the election but in private are known to have struck deals with local leaders to allow polling activity so that they may influence the vote in return.
One must not expect any significant over-night changes, either for the better or worse. It is important to understand that the election is, at the end of the day, just another step in, what has been, a long road towards a stable, democratic, peaceful and prosperous Afghanistan in the post-Taliban era.
(This article was published in the op-ed section of The Pioneer on April 3, 2014)
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