By Steve Hynd
In Afghanistan, slowly released partial figures from last week's elections are showing an increasing margin of victory for incumbent poresident Hamid Karzai, though not yet enough to avoid a run off contest with his opponent Abdullah Abdullah. Yesterday Karzai was shown as 3% ahead, today it's 9%.
Karzai thus far has 43% of the vote, a far cry from the 68% his camp claimed he'd won when the electoral authorities suddenly said that the vote-counting, which had been expected to last weeks in a nation with such poor infrastructure that more than 3,000 donkeys had to be used to deliver ballots to outlying areas, had suddenly been accomplished in one day. But there's still plenty of time to "massage" the incredibly fraud-ridden voting to create the perception of a narrow first-round win for Karzai, as one UN official told the Guardian would happen.
However, the election may have put everyone in a Catch-22 situation, writes the London Times correspondent in Kabul, Jeremy Page:
If the Electoral Complaints Commission is unable to prove any of the hundreds of allegations of fraud it is investigating, then Mr Karzai will win the first round, but the final result will be illegitimate in the eyes of many, especially Tajiks in the north.
If it can find evidence of fraud, however, and invalidates a large number of votes in the south, then Mr Karzai could lose in the first round, or be pushed into a run-off with Mr Abdullah, and the ethnic Pashtun majority would feel disenfranchised.
Neither option is palatable.
Both threaten to split the country along ethnic lines in a way not seen since the loya jirga (grand council) in 2003, when the country�s various factions argued bitterly over the drafting of a new constitution.
Each would also undermine the credibility of the international mission to build democracy in Afghanistan at a time when it is already losing support among Afghans and Nato member states.
The most frustrating thing is that this paradox was predictable: it was obvious that turnout was going to be lowest in the insurgency-racked south, and equally obvious that Mr Karzai�s allies would try to rig the vote there to compensate.
Yet the international community � the British and Americans in particular � simply shrugged this off with the mantra that �any result is better than no result� and left it to Afghanistan�s fragile democratic institutions to resolve the mess.
There's a slim chance of avoiding ethnic rivalry, and ironically it lies in the fact that Afghanistan is a country under foreign occupation.
Afghans have little faith in their own democratic institutions and still hold the international community responsible for what happens in their country, which is, after all, home to 100,000 foreign troops and propped up by international aid.
Proof of that is that most candidates are putting their faith not in the Independent Election Commission, which is headed by a Karzai ally, but the Electoral Complaints Commission, which is headed by a Canadian bureaucrat.
There may yet be a way out of the impasse.
The mostly promising compromise is that the Electoral Complaints Commission invalidates enough votes to satisfy most Afghans that some kind of justice has been done, while still handing Mr Karzai a first-round victory.
Mr Abdullah, who has behaved with admirable restraint so far, could be persuaded to accept the result and become the leader of the opposition.
It would still be an achievement of sorts to have resolved the crisis through legal channels and backroom deals, rather than a show of strength on the streets.
That's exactly what we seem to be heading towards, but it's still a slim chance to be pinning all hopes of avoiding ethnic fighting upon, though. And it certainly won't create anything like legitimacy for the new government with those it must try to govern. It's just papering over the cracks. Or if you prefer Donald M.Snow's metaphor, putting lipstick on a pig.
Karzai is a Pashtun (although one with whom rural Pashtuns do not much identify), voting was very low in Pashtun areas, and yet Karzai is apparently winning. Abdullah, on the other hand, is of mixed ethnic background (Pashtun father, Tajik mother), is closely associated with the Northern Alliance (he was their foreign minister for a time), voting was relatively high in those areas, and he is apparently losing. Draw your own conclusions.
Prof. Snow writes that the lipstick will wear off soon enough, "and underneath, we will still find a swine."
Update. From Time's Jason Motlagh in Kabul:
[Presidential candidate Ramzan] Bashardost suspects everything is part of a plot to gradually increase one candidate's margin of victory, stretched out over an extended time period designed to dampen anger by his rivals. "It's a preparation," Bashardost says, contending that the U.S. is playing a role in manipulating the outcome and that Washington is planning to broker a deal among the leading candidates to get the process over with.
U.S. officials, meanwhile, say they are working to avoid the prospect of post-election unrest. Richard Holbrooke, the American special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, has met with Abdullah and Karzai to insist they refrain from claiming victory until results are complete. Yet the longer this process drags on and the barbs fly, analysts say, the greater the space for troublemaking. "It is dangerous for each side to keep supporters [charged up] for the future," says Nasrullah Stanikzai, a politics professor at Kabul University.
Motlagh also provides details on video shot by the Abdullah team showing ballot stuffing and other polling fraud by the Karzai camp.
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