Even a month ago few people would have believed it possible. But the seemingly impossible has just happened in Afghanistan. We are, of course, referring to the country’s first presidential election held earlier this month. With almost all results counted, it is clear that Hamid Karzai has won a convincing victory. Though Karzai’s election is a major event in its own right, what makes the Afghan experience even more significant is that all the losers in this election have accepted the results and promised to help rebuild the war-shattered country.
While there is no democracy without elections, it is possible to have elections without democracy. An election becomes a sign of democratization only when many candidates and parties are allowed to stand, and when the losers, no matter how painful their defeat, accept the results. Both those conditions were met in the Afghan experience. In the American presidential election of 2000, the refusal of the Democratic candidate, Al Gore, to accept the Florida results led to a crisis that lasted weeks and finally intervention by the Supreme Court to resolve. Four years later many Americans have not yet absorbed the shock of Gore’s loss. In last month’s presidential election in Indonesia, the incumbent, President Megawati Sukarnoputri, emerged as the loser. Although she could not challenge the results, she manifested her chagrin by boycotting the inauguration of the winner. In Afghanistan there will be no such show of pique. Yunus Qanooni, the candidate who was second after Karzai, and Abdul-Rashid Dostum, who was third, have not only announced their acceptance of the results, but have also extended the hand of cooperation to Karzai.
All this is to the credit of the new Afghan leadership and, beyond them, the people of Afghanistan who turned out en masse to vote. By turning out to vote, they have confounded the ethnocentric naysayers who claimed that the Afghans, being largely poor and illiterate, were not ready for democracy, and that their “warlord” leaders were more comfortable with bullets than ballots.
Afghanistan has fulfilled the moral contract that it made with the rest of the world during the Bonn and Tokyo conferences of 2001 and 2002. Those contracts committed the Afghans to work for peace, to cleanse their homeland of terrorists, and to introduce a democratic pluralist system. They have done all that as best as they could. It is now the turn of the rest of the world to honor its obligations. Of the $5 billion that the major donors pledged to reconstruction projects in Afghanistan in 2002, less than a third has been disbursed. Even the United States which led the coalition that liberated Afghanistan has been less generous than its rhetoric suggests. The US aid package for Afghanistan amounts to a miserly $300 million for the current year.
The major powers, starting with the US, should put their money where their mouths are. Afghanistan’s democracy remains fragile and under threat from the remnants of the Taleban and their Al-Qaeda allies. It needs massive support today. Tomorrow may be too late.
