As Afghanistan’s presidential election heads for a second round, after no candidate managed to secure a majority during last month’s polls, an important but subtle battle is being waged. No, this is not the sort of campaign brinksmanship you may be used to; despite impassioned speeches and televised debates, there is little, if anything, that actually distinguishes the platforms of the three leading candidates. Abdullah Abdullah, Ashraf Ghani, and Zalmay Rasul have all pledged to sign the bilateral security agreement with Washington to keep U.S. troops in country, for example, and all have promised to back away from Hamid Karzai’s anti-American rhetoric.
Instead, the battle is over the very meaning of the elections themselves. Early reports were positive: Afghan and Western media heralded the first round polls as a triumph over the Taliban; the official count of seven million votes well surpassed the last two elections; the New York Times reported levels of ballot stuffing so far below the last fraud-scarred vote that it declared it “relatively clean”; and election day violence was far lower than expected, prompting headlines proclaiming that Afghans had defied Taliban threats to vote.
In the subsequent weeks, though, nearly every one of these claims has been quietly overturned or qualified. Stories of ghost polling centers in the insecure rural areas, where there were few observers, began to surface. Traveling in rural Wardak province, for instance, I encountered a ghost center, with campaign workers huddled nearby stuffing ballots. (Though I saw very little voting anywhere in Wardak, the Independent Elections Commission of Afghanistan claimed that thousands voted in the province, including at the ghost station). In Andar district of Ghazni province, a former Taliban stronghold which was touted by Afghan officials as a polling day success story, an investigation by independent journalist Fazel Rahman uncovered dozens of ghost centers and perhaps tens of thousands of phantom votes.
In fact, the number of fraud and ballot-stuffing complaints has exceeded the previous presidential election. And election day seemed peaceful only because the majority of reporters and observers were in the cities, the most secure areas in the country. “As data from the countryside trickles in,” Graeme Smith of the International Crisis Group in Kabul told me, “indications are that this election day is more violent than any Afghanistan has seen so far.” According to a Western organization that tracks such incidents, more civilians died on election day this year than in either of the previous two votes.
The contrasting narratives of fraud-troubled, violent election on the one hand, and a peaceful, clean poll on the other, were in part due to circumstance—the trouble lay in the war-torn hinterlands, where, because of the Taliban’s propensity to kidnap for ransom, observers and journalists cannot easily travel. But it was in part by design: many Kabul-bound Afghan elites I’ve spoken to emphasized the need for positive news in a country that has seen little but the opposite for thirty-three years. Reporters for some local media outlets were instructed to play down or ignore worrying reports from the countryside; one Afghan journalist friend told me of how he had attempted to file a story about violence on election day only to be rebuffed by his editors.
To a large extent, this battle of perceptions is not about legitimacy but about foreign support. Without Western aid, the Afghan state will likely collapse, and there is growing fear among Afghan elites that the U.S. will abandon the country—just as it did following the end of the Cold War, in 1992, which ushered in a civil war that killed tens of thousands. Without the billions of dollars the Afghan security forces are currently receiving from the U.S. and other foreign patrons, they will very likely collapse into competing militias and gangs. By convincing a war-weary American public that Afghanistan can stand on its own with continued help, the hope is that the U.S. will halt its draw down and renew its engagement.
So, for good reason, efforts to portray Afghan events in a positive light are spirited and consistent. But in doing so, the Afghan elite may be digging its own grave: Whereas the U.S. military has recommended a force size of at least 10,000 to train and support Afghan troops, the real and perceived election successes have prompted officials to explore the possibility of a much smaller force. An election conducted entirely by Afghans without visible hiccups, in other words, may only hasten the U.S. exit.
Even so, the elections do give us something to celebrate, though not necessarily of the kind you might expect. In a country with a barely functioning state, large sections of a countryside under the control of the Taliban or pro-American warlords, an opium cultivation revenue equaling the national GDP, and a criminal narco-mafia comprising much of the insurgency and the government, success in these elections cannot be measured in terms of turnout or levels of fraud. Instead, it’s what comes after the elections that matter: if Afghan political elites accept the outcome, fraud and all, and support the peaceful transition of power from Hamid Karzai’s thirteen-year reign, we will have witnessed a triumph. And initial indications are that we’re seeing just that. Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani, the first and second place finishers, respectively, in last month’s poll, are separated by large enough margin that it’s unlikely a dispute over fraud could stymie the political process. Instead, they are busy exploring coalitions with other candidates to bolster their chances in the second round. Or Abdullah and Ghani may even form a coalition with each other, avoiding the expense and danger of another round altogether, and form a government that aligns a number of disparate political tendencies. In a country where violence has seemed never-ending for so long, simply avoiding bloodshed, and moving toward an accord, is victory enough.
This article was republished from The Weekly Wonk, New America’s digital magazine. Read the original on the New America website.
