The decision to hold a runoff to the fraud-distorted Afghan presidential election matters more to the foreign countries combating the Taleban and Al-Qaeda than it does to the ordinary Afghans. Most of the latter were already resigned to another five years with Hamid Karzai as their president.
It was those nations supplying troops to the NATO-run International Security Assistance Force who drove the political fix that caused Karzai to back down from his earlier insistence that the vote was fair and free and that he had won the necessary outright majority to avoid a second round.
Nowhere is the Afghan war popular. In both the US and UK in particular there has been outrage that soldiers’ lives were lost guaranteeing the security of an election that turned out to be bogus.
Conveniently ignoring their own controversial first-term election of George W. Bush in 2000, ordinary US voters asked why America was shedding blood and coin to back a fraudster. This also ignored the fact that Karzai’s chief opponent, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah was also found guilty of fraud — 200,000 of his votes were thrown out by the UN-backed Afghan Electoral Complaint Commission. US voters also seemed to forget that they have been told this is a war that they have to win, for their own safety. If the Taleban return to power, they were told, Al-Qaeda will come with them and will once again have a secure base from which to assault the US and its allies in the war against international terror. Nevertheless concern about US public opinion has clearly held up President Obama from sanctioning the extra 40,000 troops his generals say they need in Afghanistan.
The question now is whether as the Afghan constitution stipulates, a runoff really can be held on Nov. 7. Can 7,000 polling centers and 25,000 polling stations be re-established, 200 top electoral officials deemed guilty of fraud be replaced and can the whole infrastructure be kept secure from both the Taleban and further fraud attempts, in less than two weeks? More importantly will Afghans, especially those in conflict areas, bother to vote again? A very low turnout on Nov. 7 would very probably dismay the international community almost as much as the ballot-stuffing first round.
The answer, of course, is for Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah to agree on a power sharing-deal and avoid all the risks of a second round. In the end it is less important which of these two men is running the country than that Afghanistan has a stable government, capable of tackling the mountainous issues before it. Karzai’s first term was lackluster. Maybe working effectively with Abdullah Abdullah, a second Karzai administration could do better. However, both men need, at this time at least, to put aside much of their political ambitions and work instead for a secure and stable future for their country.
