BY DARRYN FITZGERALD
Daily Staff Reporter
Published September 20, 2009
Editor’s Note: Today the Daily debuts a new series, “Office Hours,” in which we sit down with experts on campus to discuss important stories of the day. The goal of the series, which will run periodically throughout the year, is to distill current affairs and events into their most significant parts through quotes and explanations from these experts. We begin with last month's much-disputed Afghan presidential elections.
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Afghanistan’s presidential elections were held over a month ago. But a winner has still not been announced among the three top contenders, incumbent President Hamid Karzai, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah and Ramazan Bashardost. Instead, accusations of voter fraud and other discrepancies have swirled, serving only to complicate and destabilize an already confusing and delicate situation. Because of the controversy, the country’s United Nations-backed Electoral Complaints Commission has recently begun the process of recounting and investigating about 10 percent of polling places to find evidence of ballet-box stuffing,
As these events unfold, The Michigan Daily sat down with four of the University’s top Middle East experts to try and make sense of it all.
Juan Cole, professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University, said the election was at first seen as an exit strategy for the United States from its involvement in the country. Without a stable Afghan government with the power to control the Taliban, though, the United States can't end its military occupation, Cole said.
But because the election has been destabilizing, Cole said, the U.S. occupation in the country will only be prolonged.
“The election has turned into a full-scale fiasco for Washington,” he said.
The Independent Election Commission of Afghanistan initially reported that Hamid Karzai received the majority of the vote with 54.6 percent, beating out Afghanistan’s former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, who garnered 27.8 percent of the vote.
Cole said that, although Karzai’s majority implies he should be the new president, if the Afghanistan Electoral Complaints Commission determines there was voter fraud, a runoff will be held.
Election officials have said that the current recount could last as long as three months.
History Profs. Ronald Suny and Jonathan Marwil argue that the United States cared more about the transparency of the election and the end goal of transferring power than the actual results.
“Either (candidate) would have been acceptable as long as (the election) looked relatively clean,” Marwil said. “(Karzai) is a very corrupt guy, but there is no question that whoever takes over would become equally corrupt.”
Suny said he believes the United States will support whoever ultimately wins the election.
“It’s a war of choice,” Suny said. “Obama backed himself into this war during the campaign to legitimize himself and show some muscle. (Former Soviet leader Mikhail) Gorbachev inherited Afghanistan too but (Obama) made it a choice.”
But Cole speculated that Karzai’s long-standing record of corruption and failure to control Taliban violence makes his projected win an unfavorable outcome for the United States.
“Initially the Obama administration was hoping the incumbent Karzai would lose,” he said.
International criticism over the legitimacy of the results has focused specifically on one-third of the votes that went to Karzai.
Those ballots are now under review, after the Electoral Complaints Commission called for recounts and forensic examinations of ballot boxes in 10 percent of polling places.
Suny argues that the failure of the election extends beyond its association with fraud and low voter turnout prompted by Taliban violence, and deeper into more fundamental issues that face a democratic election held in a tribal nation.
“These kinds of elections are a Western innovation,” he said.
