blackascoal
The Force is With Me
With only days to go before the election in Afghanistan, it looks like the fix is in. That's what most Afghans have been saying all along.
The danger now is not that the election might be tainted by backroom deals or fraud. That's old news. Even international bodies charged with facilitating the process have given up the goal of "free and fair" elections. They aim instead for "credible" elections--which means results that look pretty good, even when they're not.
No, the real danger is that those international bodies, led by the United States, will validate the crooked election as "credible" even when it doesn't look good at all. Yet the hopes of the US-led international community ride on a credible outcome to provide evidence of Afghanistan's conversion to "democracy." Not to mention their vested interests--including an estimated $500 million to stage this extravaganza. If they were going to fess up to fraud, they should have done so long ago.
A quick list of only a few things gone wrong:
Stacking the Deck: All the members of the so-called Independent Election Commission were appointed by President Karzai, and they've never disguised their allegiance to him. So the initial vetting process for candidates eliminated some promising challengers and spared old cronies, including the war criminals the process was meant to screen out.
Backroom Deals: One after another, potential and declared candidates have bowed out to back Karzai. Word leaks out about which ministries they've been promised. Karzai buys the support of local leaders running for provincial offices, using (illegally) all the perks of office, from airplanes to free airtime on national TV, to help his friends and himself. One of his deals brought him Hazara support in exchange for the notorious Shia Personal Status Law, enforcing a wife's sexual servitude in violation of the Afghan Constitution.
Voter Fraud: In May in Ghazni, $200 would buy 200 blank registration cards, but lots of people, including minors, already had plenty. Men were able to get a bunch by handing in a list of women for whom they will vote by proxy. Since no central registry exists, verification is impossible. A recent report places the number of voter registration cards distributed (not including fakes) at 17 million, almost twice the estimated number of eligible voters in the country. To guarantee victory in the last elections in 2004 and 2005, many candidates arranged to have ballot boxes stuffed while awaiting transport to central collection points. So this time the votes are to be tallied at the polling places. That should make it even easier for local big men to fix the results; they won't even have to count.
All this--and much more chicanery--leaves the United States in a no-win situation of its own making. We got into it in 2004 by overestimating our ability to put one over on Afghans and Americans alike. And by underestimating Afghans: we expected voter fraud and we ignored it. Even when the percentage of women voters surpassed an inconceivable 70 percent of the total voter registration (in provinces where women are scarcely allowed out of the house), some internationals welcomed the trend. More blatant fraud this time around, and more conspicuous deals, are proof of Afghans' aptitude for the game we taught them to call "democracy."
-- more at link
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090831/jones
The U.S. Mission in Afghanistan Creeps Back to Nation-Building
President Barack Obama prioritized the conflict in Afghanistan soon after taking office, but he made it clear that the U.S. would scale down its ambitions there. The objective of the mission would be to defeat al-Qaeda and its supporters in the Taliban, rather than trying to turn Afghanistan into a modern, well-governed state. "We are not going to be able to rebuild Afghanistan into a Jeffersonian democracy," the new President said.
(Read "The Taliban Threat to Disrupt the Afghan Election.")
Defense Secretary Robert Gates was even more blunt: "If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of a Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose," Gates told Congress. "Because nobody in the world has that much time, patience or money, to be honest."
(See pictures of the new offensive in Afghanistan.)
But last week, when Obama's Afghanistan point man Richard Holbrooke and his team laid out the Administration's aims for Afghanistan during a briefing at Washington's Center for American Progress, it was clear that the agenda had grown more ambitious. There was talk of creating jobs, growing agribusiness, reforming the justice sector, promoting mobile banking, starting a media commission, fighting corruption. Holbrooke never actually used the phrase, but his program sounded suspiciously like nation-building.
It fell to Holbrooke's host, former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta, to point out that the policy "reflects a much larger strategy than the very narrow definition that the President used."
For many Afghanistan experts, that's as it should be. U.S. security goals in the region, they argue, cannot be achieved purely by military means; good governance and modern institutions are essential to prevent the resurgence of extremism and to allow American and NATO troops to someday head home. "Democracy and development have to be part of any exit strategy," says the Rand Corp.'s James Dobbins, who was President Bush's first envoy to Kabul.
(Read "Afghanistan Exit Strategy: Buying Off the Taliban?")
But if the Obama Administration has indeed signed up for nation-building in Afghanistan, it hasn't told the American electorate — an omission that could bring political grief at home and strategic costs in Afghanistan. In his comments on Afghanistan to date, Obama has "never owned up to state-building, never said so," says Ashley Tellis, an Afghanistan expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "He's committed to doing something that the country has not been brought along."
Tellis agrees with Holbrooke's broad approach, but worries that the Administration hasn't adequately forewarned the U.S. public about the costs of nation-building. "It's expensive, time-consuming and requires a national commitment," he says. "Reluctance to own up to this in a transparent way could be the undoing [of the Obama strategy]."
-- more at link
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1917232,00.html
Afghanistan is Iraq, it is Vietnam.
War is a racket.
The danger now is not that the election might be tainted by backroom deals or fraud. That's old news. Even international bodies charged with facilitating the process have given up the goal of "free and fair" elections. They aim instead for "credible" elections--which means results that look pretty good, even when they're not.
No, the real danger is that those international bodies, led by the United States, will validate the crooked election as "credible" even when it doesn't look good at all. Yet the hopes of the US-led international community ride on a credible outcome to provide evidence of Afghanistan's conversion to "democracy." Not to mention their vested interests--including an estimated $500 million to stage this extravaganza. If they were going to fess up to fraud, they should have done so long ago.
A quick list of only a few things gone wrong:
Stacking the Deck: All the members of the so-called Independent Election Commission were appointed by President Karzai, and they've never disguised their allegiance to him. So the initial vetting process for candidates eliminated some promising challengers and spared old cronies, including the war criminals the process was meant to screen out.
Backroom Deals: One after another, potential and declared candidates have bowed out to back Karzai. Word leaks out about which ministries they've been promised. Karzai buys the support of local leaders running for provincial offices, using (illegally) all the perks of office, from airplanes to free airtime on national TV, to help his friends and himself. One of his deals brought him Hazara support in exchange for the notorious Shia Personal Status Law, enforcing a wife's sexual servitude in violation of the Afghan Constitution.
Voter Fraud: In May in Ghazni, $200 would buy 200 blank registration cards, but lots of people, including minors, already had plenty. Men were able to get a bunch by handing in a list of women for whom they will vote by proxy. Since no central registry exists, verification is impossible. A recent report places the number of voter registration cards distributed (not including fakes) at 17 million, almost twice the estimated number of eligible voters in the country. To guarantee victory in the last elections in 2004 and 2005, many candidates arranged to have ballot boxes stuffed while awaiting transport to central collection points. So this time the votes are to be tallied at the polling places. That should make it even easier for local big men to fix the results; they won't even have to count.
All this--and much more chicanery--leaves the United States in a no-win situation of its own making. We got into it in 2004 by overestimating our ability to put one over on Afghans and Americans alike. And by underestimating Afghans: we expected voter fraud and we ignored it. Even when the percentage of women voters surpassed an inconceivable 70 percent of the total voter registration (in provinces where women are scarcely allowed out of the house), some internationals welcomed the trend. More blatant fraud this time around, and more conspicuous deals, are proof of Afghans' aptitude for the game we taught them to call "democracy."
-- more at link
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090831/jones
The U.S. Mission in Afghanistan Creeps Back to Nation-Building
President Barack Obama prioritized the conflict in Afghanistan soon after taking office, but he made it clear that the U.S. would scale down its ambitions there. The objective of the mission would be to defeat al-Qaeda and its supporters in the Taliban, rather than trying to turn Afghanistan into a modern, well-governed state. "We are not going to be able to rebuild Afghanistan into a Jeffersonian democracy," the new President said.
(Read "The Taliban Threat to Disrupt the Afghan Election.")
Defense Secretary Robert Gates was even more blunt: "If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of a Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose," Gates told Congress. "Because nobody in the world has that much time, patience or money, to be honest."
(See pictures of the new offensive in Afghanistan.)
But last week, when Obama's Afghanistan point man Richard Holbrooke and his team laid out the Administration's aims for Afghanistan during a briefing at Washington's Center for American Progress, it was clear that the agenda had grown more ambitious. There was talk of creating jobs, growing agribusiness, reforming the justice sector, promoting mobile banking, starting a media commission, fighting corruption. Holbrooke never actually used the phrase, but his program sounded suspiciously like nation-building.
It fell to Holbrooke's host, former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta, to point out that the policy "reflects a much larger strategy than the very narrow definition that the President used."
For many Afghanistan experts, that's as it should be. U.S. security goals in the region, they argue, cannot be achieved purely by military means; good governance and modern institutions are essential to prevent the resurgence of extremism and to allow American and NATO troops to someday head home. "Democracy and development have to be part of any exit strategy," says the Rand Corp.'s James Dobbins, who was President Bush's first envoy to Kabul.
(Read "Afghanistan Exit Strategy: Buying Off the Taliban?")
But if the Obama Administration has indeed signed up for nation-building in Afghanistan, it hasn't told the American electorate — an omission that could bring political grief at home and strategic costs in Afghanistan. In his comments on Afghanistan to date, Obama has "never owned up to state-building, never said so," says Ashley Tellis, an Afghanistan expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "He's committed to doing something that the country has not been brought along."
Tellis agrees with Holbrooke's broad approach, but worries that the Administration hasn't adequately forewarned the U.S. public about the costs of nation-building. "It's expensive, time-consuming and requires a national commitment," he says. "Reluctance to own up to this in a transparent way could be the undoing [of the Obama strategy]."
-- more at link
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1917232,00.html
Afghanistan is Iraq, it is Vietnam.
War is a racket.
