“It scarcely needs to be said that the Afghan elections could have gone a great deal better”, said The Independent. There could have been a higher turn-out, less fraud, less violence and a clearer victory. And early returns – based on the 10% of the votes counted so far – suggest a close result, so a second round of voting will be needed to decide between President Hamid Karzai and his closest challenger, Abdullah Abdullah. This will entail uncertainty, possible violence and will drag the electoral process on until October.
Whatever the outcome – and the “stitched-up Karzai administration” will almost certainly return – a fundamental problem remains, said Robert Fisk, also in The Independent. I doubt if anyone’s vote was decided on a candidate’s policies. Ethnically divided societies vote on ethnic lines: so Karzai relies on the Uzbek and Pashtun vote; Abdullah on the Tajik vote.
Worse, we still believe that all we have to do is “fiddle with Afghan laws and leave behind us a democratic, gender-equal, human rights-filled society”. But you could no more persuade the tribal elders of a remote village of the benefits of women’s education than you could “persuade Henry VIII of the benefits of parliamentary democracy”. Indeed, this election, with its “awesome scale of electoral pollution”, should be a “moment of truth for liberal interventionists everywhere,” said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. Trying to shunt a country from anarchy to democracy is a “noble aim”, but we will not achieve it.
So if we are wasting our time, should we tell Afghan voters that they were wasting theirs? asked Janet Daley in The Sunday Telegraph. They have risked death and mutilation to participate in the electoral process. However ineffectual their individual votes may prove in a compromised, flawed election, which of us “should be able to dismiss their courage as futile and irrelevant”?