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.

Broadband test offers street view

There are big variations between broadband speeds in the same street, a new broadband speed test has revealed.

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The test, launched by comparison site Top 10 Broadband, allows users to zoom in on their postcode area to see what speed their neighbours net runs at.

It will be a wake-up call for internet service providers, thinks Alex Buttle, marketing director at Top 10 Broadband.

"One person at 1Mbps [megabit per second] could be next door to someone receiving 8.5Mbps," he said.

"We know that broadband speed will vary depending on things like distance from the exchange and the way the wiring and equipment in your house is set up but we do not believe this explains all of the variations we have seen between people in the same street," said Mr Buttle.

"We think some of this may be due to outdated technology some providers use in their local exchanges, as well as the fact that some providers use traffic shaping or throttling at peak times while others do not," he added.

The service, dubbed StreetStats, collects speed test data from users to build an interactive map.

More than 170,000 speed test results have so far been added to the map and the firm hopes to have two million by the end of the year.

Future plans

While many consumers remain focused on their current speeds, the debate about broadband has moved on to how quickly, how far, and at what cost next-generation speeds can be rolled out.

Entering this debate, Shadow Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has said that a Conservative government would scrap the proposed broadband tax, which was intended to provide a fund for next-generation access in difficult-to-reach areas.

The £6 a year tax was aimed at every home with a fixed line phone.

Mr Hunt told the BBC that the Conservatives had a different vision of how to make sure superfast broadband was available across the UK.

"We're saying that this is the wrong time to decide about how to fund comprehensive coverage when we haven't even got the infrastructure in place in the main areas," he told the BBC.

"We accept that to make coverage comprehensive might need public funds at some stage but we need to look at other things too, such as the regulatory framework," he added.

It could be that the UK follows France's example and forces BT to open up its ducting to other parties, he said.

'Wild' film top at US box office

A fantasy film about a make-believe world of monsters has entered the US and Canada box office at number one.

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Where The Wild Things Are made $32.5m (£19.9m) in its first weekend, beating Jamie Foxx thriller Law Abiding Citizen into a second place debut.

The film, which mixes live action and animation, is based on the children's book by Maurice Sendak, but audiences were predominantly made up of adults.

Ghost flick Paranormal Activity was also a new entry at number three.

The film - shot in the style of a documentary - is said to have made a box office impact due to word-of-mouth interest and has been compared to 1999 hit The Blair Witch Project.

It beat the debut Sony's bigger budget horror movie The Stepfather into fifth spot.

It is due to be expanded into more cinemas at the weekend where it will go head-to-head with established horror franchise outing Saw VI.

The adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are, directed by Spike Jonze, features the voices of Forest Whitaker and James Gandolfini.

The story's main protagonist is a boy who journeys to a land populated by monsters who are torn between hugging him and having him for dinner.

millions internet users fall victim to 'scareware' scams

Online criminals are making millions of pounds by convincing computer users to download fake anti-virus software, internet security experts claim.

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Symantec says more than 40 million people have fallen victim to the "scareware" scam in the past 12 months. He added: "They used to be 16-year-olds in their bedrooms causing damage with viruses. Now those 16-year-olds have grown up [and] they're looking for money, they're looking for information."

The download is usually harmful and criminals can sometimes use it to get the victim's credit card details.

The firm has identified 250 versions of scareware, and criminals are thought to earn more than £750,000 each a year.

Franchised out

Scareware sellers use pop-up adverts deliberately designed to look legitimate, for example, using the same typefaces as Microsoft and other well-known software providers.

They appear, often when the user is switching between websites, and falsely warn that a computer's security has been compromised.

If the user then clicks on the message they are directed towards another site where they can download the fake anti-virus software they supposedly need to clean up their computer - for a fee of up to £60.

Con Mallon, from Symantec, told the BBC the apparent fix could have a double impact on victims.

Mr Mallon said some scareware took the scam a step further.

"[They] could hold your computer to ransom where they will stop your computer working or lock up some of your personal information, your photographs or some of your Word documents.

"They will extort money from you at that point. They will ask you to pay some additional money and they will then release your machine back to you."

The scam is hard for police or other agencies to investigate because the individual sums of money involved are very small.

Therefore, experts say users must protect themselves with common sense and legitimate security software.

'Steal your identity'

Tony Neate, from Get Safe Online, told the BBC the threats presented by the internet had changed in recent years.

"Where we used to say protect your PC... we've now got to look at ourselves, making sure we're protected against the con men who are out there," he said.

"They want you to help them infect your machine. When they've infected your machine it's possibly no longer your machine - you've got no control over it.

"Then what they're looking to do is take away your identity, steal bits of your identity, or even get some financial information from you."

A Variety of Sources Feed Into Taliban’s War Chest. Reports

WASHINGTON : The Taliban in Afghanistan are running a sophisticated financial network to pay for their insurgent operations, raising hundreds of millions of dollars from the illicit drug trade, kidnappings, extortion and foreign donations that American officials say they are struggling to cut off.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban have imposed an elaborate system to tax the cultivation, processing and shipment of opium, as well as other crops like wheat grown in the territory they control, American and Afghan officials say. In the Middle East, Taliban leaders have sent fund-raisers to Arab countries to keep the insurgency’s coffers brimming with cash.

Estimates of the Taliban’s annual revenue vary widely. Proceeds from the illicit drug trade alone range from $70 million to $400 million a year, according to Pentagon and United Nations officials. By diversifying their revenue stream beyond opium, the Taliban are frustrating American and NATO efforts to weaken the insurgency by cutting off its economic lifelines, the officials say.

Despite efforts by the United States and its allies in the last year to cripple the Taliban’s financing, using the military and intelligence, American officials acknowledge they barely made a dent.

“I don’t believe we can significantly alter their effectiveness by cutting off their money right now,” said Representative Adam Smith, a Washington State Democrat on the House Intelligence and Armed Services Committees who traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan last month. “I’m not saying we shouldn’t try. It’s just bigger and more complex than we can effectively stop.”

The Taliban’s ability to raise money complicates the Obama administration’s decision to deploy more United States troops to Afghanistan. It is unclear, for example, whether the deployment of 10,000 Marines over the summer to Helmand Province, the heart of the opium production, will have a sustaining impact on the insurgency’s cash flow. And American officials are debating whether cracking down on the drug trade will anger farmers dependent on it for their livelihood.

But even if the United States and its allies were able to stanch the money flow, it is not clear how much impact it would have. It does not cost much to train, equip and pay for the insurgency in impoverished Afghanistan — fighters typically earn $200 to $500 a month — and to bribe local Afghan security and government officials.

“Their operations are so inexpensive that they can be continued indefinitely even with locally generated resources such as small businesses and donations,” said Kenneth Katzman, a Middle East specialist at the Congressional Research Service and a former analyst of the region at the C.I.A.

American officials say that they have been surprised to learn in recent months that foreign donations, rather than opium, are the single largest source of cash for the Taliban.

“In the past there was a kind of a feeling that the money all came from drugs in Afghanistan,” Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said in June. “That is simply not true.”

Supporting this view, in his Aug. 30 strategic assessment, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan, voiced skepticism that clamping down on the opium trade would crimp the Taliban’s overall finances.

“Eliminating insurgent access to narco-profits — even if possible, and while disruptive — would not destroy their ability to operate so long as other funding sources remained intact,” General McChrystal said.

The C.I.A. recently estimated in a classified report that Taliban leaders and their associates had received $106 million in the past year from donors outside Afghanistan, a figure first reported last month by The Washington Post. Private citizens from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran and some Persian Gulf nations are the largest individual contributors, an American counterterrorism official said.

Top American intelligence officials and diplomats say there is no evidence so far that the governments of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates or other Persian Gulf states are providing direct aid to the Afghan insurgency. But American intelligence officials say they suspect that Pakistani intelligence operatives continue to give some financial aid to the Afghan Taliban, a practice the Pakistani government denies.

The United States Treasury Department and the United Nations have for years maintained financial blacklists of those suspected of being donors to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. But counterterrorism officials say donors have become savvier about disguising their contributions to avoid detection.

“The sanctions have worked to a certain extent but obviously not to the extent of being able to cut off all funds,” said Richard Barrett, a former British intelligence officer now monitoring Al Qaeda and the Taliban for the United Nations.

Still, drugs play an important role. Afghanistan produces more opium than any other country in the world, and the Taliban are widely believed to make money at virtually every stage of the trade.

“It extorts funds from those involved in the heroin trade by demanding ‘protection’ payments from poppy farmers, drug lab operators and the smugglers who transport the chemicals into, and the heroin out of, the country,” David S. Cohen, an assistant secretary at the Treasury Department responsible for combating terrorist financing, said in a speech in Washington last week.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in a report issued in August, said that Taliban commanders charged poppy farmers a 10 percent tax, and that Taliban fighters supplemented their pay by working in the poppy fields during harvest. The biggest source of drug money for the Taliban is regular payments made by drug traffickers to the Taliban leadership, based in the Pakistani border city of Quetta, according to the report.

Counterterrorism experts say the relationship of the insurgents to drug trafficking is shifting in an ominous direction. A United Nations report issued in August said that some opium-trafficking guerrillas had secretly stockpiled more than 10,000 tons of illegal opium — worth billions of dollars and enough to satisfy at least two years of world demand. The large stockpiles could bolster the insurgency’s war chest and further undercut the ability of NATO military operations to curb the flow of drug money to the Taliban.

A third major source of financing for the Taliban is criminal activity, including kidnappings and protection payments from legitimate businesses seeking to operate in Taliban-controlled territory, American authorities say.

The United States has created two new entities aimed at disrupting the trafficking networks and illicit financing. One group, the Afghan Threat Finance Cell, is located at Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul. The second group, the Illicit Finance Task Force based in Washington, also aims to identify and disrupt the financial networks supporting terrorists and narcotics traffickers in the region.

American officials say they are working closely with the Afghan government to dry up the Taliban financing, but as one senior American military officer in Afghanistan put it last week, “I won’t overstate the progress.”

Carlotta Gall contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.