Afghanistan's Elections: A Witness Account

It appears that free democratic elections in Afghanistan left something to be desired this past week. Low voter turnout was the name of the game. ~Charee

The GuardianWorldNews
Democratic disillusionment
The low turnout for Afghanistan's parliamentary elections has given Hamid Karzai plenty of reasons to worry, says Declan Walsh
Friday September 23, 2005

Something felt wrong. My car raced through Kabul, a strained city normally clogged with people, choked with dust and filled with a cacophony of honking car horns and calls to prayer. But at lunchtime last Sunday - a working day in Afghanistan - we whizzed through deserted streets, past shuttered shops and ghostly bazaars. Ostensibly, the reason was the elections. For the first time in more than three decades, the country was going to the polls to choose its parliament. To celebrate, the government had declared a national holiday.

But if the streets were vacant, so were the voting booths. In one polling station after another, voters dribbled through the doors. At a primary school in western Kabul, I found just one voter - a 70-year-old woman hobbling into the polling station, supported at the elbow by her son. And at the Habiba high school, there were none. My footsteps echoed loudly in the empty corridors as election officials fidgeted beside vacant booths.

It seemed bizarre - Afghanistan was hosting a great party for democracy, yet it looked as though nobody had bothered to turn up. Figures released yesterday confirmed those suspicions. Turnout was just 36% in the capital and around 53% across the country, the chief electoral officer, Peter Erben, said - a sharp dip on the 70% seen in last year's presidential poll.

Officials are pedalling hard to find comforting explanations. Mr Erben said the drop was normal in comparison with other post-conflict countries - even though, days earlier, he had handed me a factsheet predicting a sharp rise in turnout. The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, also put on a happy face for a positive spin. He was "more than happy", he said during a roundtable press conference at his fortified Kabul palace a few days later.

Maybe they are right. There are sound reasons why so many Afghans stayed at home. Some were afraid of Taliban violence, while others were intimidated by the huge ballot papers. Voters in Kabul had to select from 390 candidates for parliament - a degree of choice that would challenge an educated electorate, much less one with a 75% illiteracy rate.

Parliamentary democracy is an alien concept to Afghans. The only communal memory of a parliament stretches back to 1973, when a king was in charge. And with an average life expectancy of 43, it's unlikely many can remember that far.

But there are also greatly worrying reasons why Mr Karzai should be concerned about the fall in turnout. After just one year of democratic rule, there are signs of rapidly swelling disenchantment. In a country awash with weapons, corrupted by drug money and threatened by a resurgent Taliban, this is a dangerous development.

The inclusion of dozens of warlords and militia commanders on the ticket disgusted voters who thought Mr Karzai and his US allies had come to usher the gunmen out of the door, not hand them the keys to the house.

The crawling pace of reconstruction is also brewing trouble. After making a string of heroic promises in late 2001, the west is letting Afghanistan down. Only around $10bn (£5.5bn) has so far been spent on reconstruction, according to most estimates. And while some projects have succeeded - well-oiled elections, some fast roads and the training of a new national army - others have been an abject failure.

For instance, this year's drive to reduce opium production - Afghanistan is the source of 90% of the world's heroin - cost much but resulted in little. Official corruption is soaring - something Mr Karzai admitted during his press conference.

Many Afghans, struggling to feed themselves, also perceive dishonesty among their foreign allies. Anger has focused particularly sharply on the sight of highly-paid foreign consultants ­ some of whom earn $1,000 a day speeding past in aggressive security convoys. "If they gave us only their stationery budget, we could have a chance to develop," Dr Ghulam Farooq, a returned refugee from Iran, said. There is some exaggeration. Afghanistan has come a long way from the days when Taliban fanatics whipped women and ran al-Qaida guesthouses.

After a quarter century of war, four years is but a twinkle of time in which to put everything right. Yet Mr Karzai should be very worried. For all its successes, his democracy remains as fragile as glass and is anchored in a US military backbone.

One only needs to see the amiable Pashtun leader's awesome security arrangements - comparable to those of the US president, George Bush - to realise that, as one observer remarked, Afghanistan is one bullet away from chaos.

The provisional election results are due on October 3. Analysts are predicting mayhem in the early months of parliament, particularly because of the lack of political parties. Nobody is quite sure how Mr Karzai will build alliances, pass new laws or run the country.

Yet for all these flaws, he must urgently use the new body to restore public confidence. As his western allies are learning painfully in Iraq, democracy is about more than just elections.


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