Fraud, No-Shows, and Rockets: Gopal on Afghan Election

By Steve Hynd

Via Russ Wellen, my recommendation for "must read" piece of today is Anand Gopal's personal account of what he witnesses during the recent Afghan parliamentary elections.

Suddenly a group of white Toyota pickups, with armed men stuffed in the back, sped towards the center and screeched to a stop near the door. The gunmen, part of a pro-government militia, forced their way into the center and removed the poll workers. They tied their hands behind their backs with scarves and forced them to kneel on the ground. �Who are you working for?� one shouted. The terrified men hung their heads and claimed innocence. After further threats, one man admitted that he was paid by Wahed Kalimzai, a local strongman and leading candidate.

As he spoke, a rocket slammed into the ground a little more than 100 feet from us, causing a number of people to run for cover. Minutes later another rocket exploded. Later I found out that it had hit the house of a civilian named Mudir Janaan, killing his son and injuring his daughter-in-law. However, both the government and the foreign forces denied that insurgents had fired rockets in the area, leaving Janaan�s family to the growing list of unrecognized victims of this war.

The militiamen took the captured men to a nearby field, leaving one behind at the polling center in case anyone decided to come to vote. Unsurprisingly, no one did.  So I interviewed the poll worker. He and other workers had been paid 200 dollars each to stuff the ballots in Kalimzai�s favor, he said.

I recognized the head militiaman who had detained the poll workers. He was an ex-Taliban fighter now working on the government�s side, in particular for a rival candidate named Hajji Akhtaro.  Akhtaro himself had orchestrated a massive effort to stuff ballots and was employing the militia to squeeze out rivals. Both Akharo and Kalimzai had gotten rich off contracts from the NATO coalition, and U.S. forces see them as key allies in the province.

The militiamen offered to take me to another polling site, and I boarded the minivan with the detainees, who by this point seemed, if anything, bemused at their own predicament. We disembarked in Sheikhabad, a dusty town with shuttered shops and empty oil cans scattered about. A clutch of U.S. military vehicles idled nearby; the gunner from one gave us a friendly wave, seemingly oblivious to the spectacle of plainclothes men marching detainees across the street at gunpoint. This polling center, too, was closed�the result of a brawl over who had the right to stuff ballots at the station. All that remained was blood-stained soil, scraps of clothing, and a few dazed men shuffling away from the center.

Anand eventually headed back to Kabul after being warned that Taliban members were looking for him.

By midday, a leathery, wrinkled old man approached and asked us to leave, for �people were coming to see us,� which was to say insurgents. We jumped aboard the minivan and sped toward Kabul. As we drove, a number of rockets struck villages on both sides of the road, spewing dirt and mud high in the air. As we neared the furrowed hills and ridges that mark the outskirts of Kabul, we heard the governor of Wardak on the radio. The elections in his province, he proclaimed, had been an overwhelming success.

Read the whole thing - it's a remarkable piece of reporting and worth bearing in mind later when the US and its Western allies fall over themselves to say that the Afghan elections were imperfect but give enough legitimacy to the Kabul government to justify carrying on the mad military adventure there.