Afghan Journal

Why Karzai decided to attack the West

It was a strange or at least unusual event. Reuters, other news wires and mostly Afghan journalists were summoned to the presidential palace early in the morning. A frequent and very familiar routine of standing around, waiting and multiple security checks then started .

On this occasion, we were packed onto mini buses with blacked-out windows and told only that we would be leaving the palace and going “some place outside”. The guessing game ended when the buses, flanked by armored Land Cruisers and charging down a busy city highway, honking other vehicles out of the way,  turned into another building very familiar to reporters in Kabul: the Independent Election Commission (IEC).

It is not unusual for President Hamid Karzai to give press conferences elsewhere in Afghanistan (in other cities for instance) but I cannot recall a time when he addressed reporters in Kabul anywhere but the press room of his palace. Not knowing what was in store, I reminded myself it was also April Fool’s day.

We all agreed that we might get a response out of Karzai about the rejection of a presidential decree by the lower house of parliament and possibly something about the reforms that the U.N. has wanted of the IEC.

What we got instead was some of Karzai’s strongest words against the West and the international community. The defiant tone was set by Azizullah Ludin, the Chairman of the IEC, who gave an impassioned and rather rambling speech about how hard he had tried to serve the Afghan people, about how difficult the presidential election in August had been to monitor and how sad he was that the foreigners were interfering so much and manipulating the efforts of the IEC.

Ludin’s deputy, the Chief Electoral Officer, Daoud Ali Najafi, then followed with a much shorter but equally defensive testimony of what he had gone through and the pressures he faced. IEC colleagues and Karzai nodded in support. The whole thing (was it a press conference? An extraordinary meeting? An open exchange of feelings about how last August’s elections went?) started to feel a bit like a rather grandiose cognitive therapy session, in which people who have been scarred by something in their life, in this case an experiment with democracy, “share their pain” with like-minded sufferers as a catharsis.

Ludin and Najafi were heavily criticized by Karzai’s main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah,  the sacked U.N. envoy to Afghanistan, Peter Galbraith, and the media, during and after the elections.

from Tales from the Trail:

Victory for Karzai, minefield for Obama?

Former President George W. Bush used to talk about the "soft bigotry of low expectations." He was talking about education in the United States.

But these days, that phrase could easily refer to the U.S. government's attitudes towards Afghanistan. Just look at the following phrases from American officials this year.

"We never promised Afghans a perfect democracy," "Afghans have lower expectations in terms of security," "we have to recognise Afghanistan will always remain a poor, conservative land with a low-level insurgency," "our goal in Afghanistan is simply to prevent al Qaeda using its territory to attack us."

All perfectly reasonable in many ways, but hardly a compelling manifesto to win Afghan hearts and minds.

The concern is that there has been such a concerted effort to lower the bar in Afghanistan this year, and to downplay what is achievable, that failure sometimes seems almost inevitable.

The United States convinced Hamid Karzai to agree to a run-off election, but failed to convince him to clean up the Election Commission that had perpetrated the fraudulent first round. That made more controversy almost inevitable.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs just declared Karzai the "legitimate leader of Afghanistan" and that the world could take heart that the laws of Afghanistan had prevailed.

from Tales from the Trail:

Time to get tough on Afghan fraud, start with the message

What message does it send when the U.N. representative to Afghanistan says it will be impossible to eliminate fraud in the run-off election?

That's what Kai Eide admitted last week, adding, "what we will try to do, is to reduce the level of fraud."

Is that really what Afghans should be hearing on the eve of this crucial vote -- steal a few less votes this time around please?

The second round of the presidential election in Afghanistan is more about credibility than the actual outcome.

And it is not just the credibility of Afghan President Hamid Karzai that is at stake, it is the credibility of the entire international effort to rebuild the country.

As the International Crisis Group says in a new report, the United Nations was closely involved in planning a first round that ended up being plagued by widespread fraud, and the UN then moved too quickly to declare the vote an unqualified success.

That reinforced the impression the international community was more interested in a rubber stamp than a credible process, and "may have cost particularly the U.S., European Union and UN what little credibility they had left with the public."

Whither Afghanistan’s election?

The U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC), made up mainly of Westerners, has published its findings into Afghanistan’s disputed, fraud-beset presidential poll.

Now Afghans must determine their political future using the bureaucratic legacy of lists and numbers the ECC has left behind. 

It’s been exactly two months since Afghans went to the poll to choose their leader. They are none the wiser today about who they can expect to be running their country.

Neither are we. Teasing out information about the elections has been a difficult process. We have relied on diplomats who cannot be named, faceless officials close to the proceedings and campaign representatives to try and make sense of an extremely vague, closed process.

Right now, officials at Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission — a much criticised office, because its panel was appointed by Karzai and is therefore seen by his main rival Abdullah Abdullah as working in his favour — are pouring over the sheets of figures published by the U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission on Monday.

A run-off, we have been told by numerous diplomats in Kabul, looks likely and some resourceful think tanks in Washington have done the math themselves and drawn the same conclusion from the ECC’s pages of numbers and percentages.

Perhaps there will be light later on Tuesday and Karzai, locked away in his forbidding presidential palace,  will step forward to speak to his people.