Afghans attend an election rally in Kandahar province on Aug. 16, 2009, in support of Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai, who is seeking a second term in the country's upcoming presidential election. The election will be held Thursday, Aug. 20. (Omar Sobhani/Reuters)
Afghanistan, and its president, in waiting
Thursday's poll will likely hand victory to one well-known candidate, but others of interest emerged during the campaign. We profile six.
KABUL — It’s been a season of surprises for Afghanistan election watchers. Six months ago the race was wide open and President Hamid Karzai was a political corpse. By mid-May the resurrected Karzai was a shoo-in, and his rivals an uncoordinated and constantly squabbling pack of no-hopers.
Then one of the contenders emerged with what many saw as a real chance. Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai’s former foreign minister, ran a strong campaign that, for a period of a few weeks, seemed able to change the dynamic. (Here is GlobalPost's guide to the candidates.)
But with just days to go before the Aug. 20 polls, the results of the ballot are no longer seriously in doubt. Veteran Afghan hands agree: Karzai will stay in office for another five years. The only suspense surrounds voter turnout, ballot box fraud and possible violence after the results are announced. Tuesday morning, just two days before the elections, three bombings ripped through the heart of Kabul.
To a large extent, the elections seem to have been reduced to a feel-good exercise for the foreign community, which is at some pains to prove that its eight-year presence in the country has not been in vain. Last summer, diplomats were speaking in lowered tones about the impossibility of conducting a valid poll in a country that was fast degenerating into chaos. Then came the decision, anointed by the United Nations: the elections will go forward because they must.
U.N. Special Representative Kai Eide has already sought to lower expectations, saying that the poll is “not perfect.” No one speaks any longer of “free and fair” elections — now international experts are content with “credible.”
For many Afghans, the whole idea was absurd from the beginning. With huge swaths of the country too volatile to establish secure polling stations; campaign teams bent on bribery and intimidation; and a host of candidates with no answers to the country’s seemingly insurmountable problems, the voters have very few expectations from the exercise.
When an American runs for the office of president everyone wants to know what he or she thinks. In the profile of the Afhgan candidates there is no mention of the policies they would pursue. All we learn is who they are what tribe they belong to previous political associations and their relative populairty. This is like throwing a dart. Do any of these people have a stand on an issue? The only thing I know from reading mutliple reports is that the ineffective current president Karzai supports raping noncompliant wives and legally starving them into compliance. He and other candidates would build their fieldoms on the backs of broken women. Isn't there anyone else to vote for?
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