John RapleyUNITED STATES(US) vice-president Dick Cheney was exaggerating when he said that this weekend's election in Afghanistan will be the first in the country's history. But not by much. There is little doubt the democratic voice of Afghans will ring louder than it has ever done. Millions are registered to vote, and reports detect a high level of enthusiasm among ordinary people.
Nonetheless, to infer from those facts that Afghanistan is now entering the ranks of the democratic world might be to stretch things
a little. The election in question is the
presidential vote. Nearly two dozen candidates are in contention, though only two are considered to have a serious shot at the presidency. One of those, the interim president Hamid Karzai, is the clear front-runner (not to mention the obvious favourite of the Americans).
Should Mr. Karzai fail to win more than half the votes on Saturday, the election will go to a second round. So strong is his lead, though, that many observers believe the other candidates are merely jockeying for positions in the post-election government that Mr. Karzai will likely form. For his part, Mr. Karzai wants a strong turnout and mandate in order to give him the legitimacy he will need to assert control over his country.
This may be the biggest challenge that will face Afghanistan's first elected president. When the Americans invaded the country in the wake of 9/11, they evinced
little of the appetite for nation-building that they have shown in Iraq. Rather than root out local
militias as they have been trying to do in Iraq, they essentially co-opted most of them. Provided they assisted in the US war on the Taliban something most of them were eager to do, having been humbled by the Taliban during the country's civil war the Americans were willing not only to turn a blind eye to their activities, but even to arm them.
CENTRAL ARMY
As a result, Afghanistan reverted to the
condition it had been in before the Taliban reunified most of the country during its brief rule: a land carved up by local warlords. The interim government has been trying to build a central army. However, as things stand, it remains just one military faction among many.
In other ways, the lacklustre American
commitment to Afghan reconstruction will hamper this election. Some areas of the
country, threatened or even controlled by
factions that oppose the election, will be unable to vote freely. In others, a dearth of independent observers and poll administrators will
render the results dubious. Indeed, the Afghan "enthusiasm" for democracy is such that more Afghans are registered to vote than there are eligible voters -- a type of enthusiasm we will readily recognise. Moreover, many Afghans are likely to follow the instructions of local leaders in choosing whom to back.
The Americans in the south, and NATO forces elsewhere, are doing what they can to hamper those trying to subvert the elections. NATO is bolstering its presence in Kabul and the US has launched a campaign with its Pakistani allies to pin down the Taliban. Yet the forces are inadequate to bring real elections to the entire country.
On the one hand, it is true that some vote is better than no vote, and that more Afghans will have a say in the selection of their leader than ever before. But on the other, should the US's enemies manage to disrupt the election on a large scale, they will draw into question the legitimacy of the new government. This, in turn, will make it even harder for the new
government to clamp down on the warlords, thereby intensifying its military dependence on its foreign backers. The Afghan government might then look like what critics say the
interim administration already is: a puppet regime dependent on foreign backing.
It is a pity that the American government did not couple its military assault on al Qaeda with an effective strategy of economic and political reconstruction, because the ground seemed so fertile for some kind of democratic experiment to take root in Afghanistan. Instead, it rushed from its battlefield successes to launch a new campaign in Iraq. In consequence, there is a danger that neither democratic experiment will succeed.
John Rapley is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona.
