Afghanistan: anatomy of an election disaster

It was, everybody agrees, a tawdry and inept attempt to rig an election. But are we in the west as much to blame as anyone?

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KABUL: For a couple of days last month at a cavernous warehouse in the bleak industrial zone of western Kabul, diplomats, UN officials and election monitors gathered to watch hundreds of ballot boxes being opened and turned out on to the floor.

The colleagues from Kabul's western missions rolled their eyes at each other as they witnessed not a chaotic assortment of marked and folded voting forms tumble out, but entire blocks of ballot papers that had not even been torn off from their book stubs. Others contained surprisingly uniform numbers of ballots all signed in the same hand and with the same pen, and overwhelmingly in favour of a single candidate.

One box did not contain any ballot papers at all; just a results slip with the final vote score showing a massive win for Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president many believe was all too aware of attempts to steal the country's second ever democratic attempt to choose a leader.
Everyone present could see a huge amount of cheating had taken place on 20 August, albeit rather ineptly. "Some of us joked with each other whether the Afghans, after all the billions that have gone in to trying to create a functioning government, also need to be taught how to rig an election properly," said one of the officials present, deeply cynical after weeks of revelations about Afghanistan's disastrous election.

It was a tawdry end to what had at times been an exciting, even uplifting, election campaign. In the big cities, including Afghanistan's mountaintop capital Kabul, the western boom town of Herat and even the insurgency-wracked southern city of Kandahar, candidates' banners had been stretched across the roads. Posters across the country showed the people their would-be presidents, many of whom hosted huge public rallies. But not all the candidates were that active. Karzai, the man who benefited most from staggering levels of fraud, only made five campaign stops, preferring instead to hold private conflabs with warlords and factional leaders.

"I've totally given up on this idea that Karzai is some sort of naive innocent surrounded by bad people," says one disillusioned western diplomat. "Why was he so confident? Why didn't he leave the palace? I think it was because people came to him and said, 'Don't worry, we've got it all under control.'"

But it would be wrong just to blame the shamelessness of Karzai's cronies for this fiasco, a fiasco which has torpedoed western hopes of the election of a legitimate partner to help turn round a failing war. The US and its allies that so dominate Afghanistan also have much to answer for, despite the staggering amount of resources they put into the exercise: $300m just to pay for the election, plus untold millions to pay for the thousands of extra foreign soldiers drafted in to try to secure the election.

"This was all predicted and predictable," says Ashraf Ghani, the former finance minister who polled fourth place. "The west has no excuse for not seeing what was going to happen."

At a recent interview at his house in southern Kabul, a clearly depressed Ghani explained how the election fiasco had been years in the making. But at every stage when decisive intervention by Afghanistan's international paymasters could have made a difference, the UN, the US, the UK and other major players all stood back. They wanted it to be an Afghan show, unlike the 2004 election where foreign officials had co-managed the election.