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Abdullah Abdullah, Afghanistan’s former foreign minister, is a clever man. By withdrawing from this coming weekend’s presidential runoff election, he has conceded the inevitable — his loss. Still, by insisting he was abandoning the race because of widespread fraud perpetrated by his rival, incumbent President Hamid Karzai, Mr. Abdullah has assured Mr. Karzai will win nothing more than a hollow victory. President Karzai will now have to work hard to overcome the impression among many Afghans that his win was tainted and, therefore, his government is illegitimate.
This, of course, has significant implications for NATO’s mission in the country and may well prevent the U.S. troop surge that generals on the ground insist is needed if the Taliban are to be permanently turned back.
Mr. Abdullah was the second-place finisher in August’s first round of balloting, but he fell well short of front-running Mr. Karzai, receiving just over a third of votes cast to Mr. Karzai’s 54%. But Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission, as well as UN election monitors, found rampant fraud. Polling stations, for instance, where no voters showed up out of fear of Taliban-promised, election-day violence nonetheless managed to turn in hundreds of ballots. In most cases, these ballots were cast all for Mr. Karzai or all for Mr. Abdullah. “Ghost polls” — polling stations that did not exist — accounted for tens of thousands of votes. And there was plenty of old-fashioned ballot stuffing with votes cast by imaginary or dead electors.
In all, observers determined about one million phony votes were cast this summer for Mr. Karzai and just over 200,000 were cast for Mr. Abdullah. Neither side was without sin. Still, Mr. Karzai’s forces seemed the more determined to elect their man on the first ballot and avoid a runoff.
Under widespread pressure from Western governments with troops on the front lines in Afghanistan, both Mr. Karzai and Mr. Abdullah acquiesced last month to a runoff.
But as the second ballot approached, two things were obvious: The election commission still had not worked out how to keep voting honest, and the country’s military and police had not figured out how to keep polling places safe from insurgent ambushes. From Mr. Abdullah’s perspective, the electorate had not budged, either. While Mr. Karzai is far from loved by Afghans and many of his national and local officials are seen as corrupt, he nevertheless was likely to win on Saturday, fraud or no fraud.
Rather than suffer a second defeat, then, Mr. Abdullah chose to poison the Karzai government’s well. Now he is in a prime spot to spend the next five years as Mr. Karzai’s chief critic and to insist at every turn that his rival stole the election.
The West has rushed to legitimize the election results. Yesterday, U.S. President Barack Obama called Mr. Karzai to congratulate him, something he had refused to do after August’s disputed result. The UN has also signed off on Mr. Karzai’s win, as has the country’s domestic election office. Mr. Obama even told reporters in the Oval Office that he had extracted a pledge from the re-elected Mr. Karzai to go “boldly and forcefully forward” to end corruption and speed the pace at which Afghan military and police are taking over national security from NATO forces, including Canada’s.
But it is not Mr. Karzai’s legitimacy in Western eyes that will determine the ultimate success or failure of efforts to build Afghanistan into a functioning democracy with a self-sufficient economy. Democracy and success cannot be imposed from above and from outside; they must come from the people of a country. The best the West can do is maintain internal stability while Afghans work out for themselves how best to structure their affairs. And it is not clear if the Afghan people will give enough support to Mr. Karzai and the Afghan parliament to achieve those desirable goals.
Mr. Karzai now must work doubly hard to maintain the support of his nation’s Western allies while also attempting to win credibility with his own citizens. Over the next year or two, he must show tremendous progress, particularly toward rooting out his own corrupt officials, or he risks pulling all the progress that has been made in the past eight years down on his head and turning NATO nations off the idea of sending their troops to defend his country.National Post
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