Widespread Fraud Alleged in Afghan Election
President Obama was right when he privately said he risks losing “the entire Democratic Party” over the war in Afghanistan. With public opinion already souring on the war, the president can’t afford much else to undermine confidence in the effort. Now it is known that President Karzai is on and off medication for manic depression and Afghanistan has held parliamentary elections with even more fraud and violence than the tainted “re-election” of Karzai.
This is now the second election in Afghanistan that has its credibility in tatters. The effect cannot be understated: The Afghan people are going to be disenchanted with democracy and an increasing number are going to simply give up on the political process. The voices among the American people saying the war isn’t worth it are going to get louder. At least Americans could point to Iraq’s elections as something beautiful and inspiring. Americans will not be so willing to send their soldiers to die for a government “elected” with excessive fraud and spend money propping it up during a recession.
An estimated 1.2 million fake ballots were cast for Hamid Karzai in August 2009. An undercover BBC reporter was offered voting cards for $10 apiece. Following the election, Karzai unilaterally reconfigured the Electoral Complaints Commission so that he had the power to appoint all five members. There was some hope that this election for 249 members of the lower house of parliament would be different, as 6,000 commission workers from the last election had been banned. By all indications, this election was actually worse.
The overall turnout was only 40 percent, and the Independent Election Commission records turnout of above 100 percent in many districts under Taliban domination. Despite initial attempts to paint the election as more credible and less violent than the last one, the U.S. now admits there were at least 100 more terrorist attacks this time. Videos have emerged allegedly showing ballot box stuffing and selective discarding by members of the police. One organization has documented over 300 incidents of voter intimidation and ballot stuffing at 280 polling stations. Nearly 4,000 complaints have been filed with the IEC, about 1,000 of which have already been labeled as “potentially significant.”
In some Pashtun areas, voter turnout was very low, a reflection of intimidation by the Taliban and an overall lack of enthusiasm. Land routes that were closed between Pakistan and Afghanistan for security reasons were secretly crossed by thousands who may have voted. It is suspected that their movement was facilitated by the government so they could be used to vote for preferred candidates. Printing shops in Pakistan printed thousands of fraudulent voter registration cards on behalf of politicians.
The turnout of the Shiite Hazaras was very high, but don’t get excited. Iran actively funded candidates and it is quite likely that Iran helped mobilize the Shiites for their own interests. It should be remembered how quickly Ahmadinejad and Karzai congratulated each other on their election victories even when manipulation was apparent. Karzai may have gone so far as to solicit him for advice in election tampering.
To hell w/ Afghanistan! I thought Obama was “anti war!” speaking of “anti war,” where are the anti war protesters that we had seen in the Bush days? The Iraq War is not over, we still have 50,000 troops there. Our government is lying to us and cheating us!
Our brave boys and girls are DYING to prop up corrupt dysfunctional regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those kaseef governments should fend for themselves; they wouldn’t last a week in power!
Our Afghani “allies” are thieves, drug dealers and they stab our government in the back by cozying up to homicidal regimes like Saudia Arabia, Iran, U.A.E and Pa Pa Pakistan. HARAM! They are all MUNAFIQS!
We should never have been on the Democracy Road in Afghanistan or Iraq in the first place. We have squandered More than a trillion $ and thousands of lives trying to graft the living tissue of civilization onto the Frankenstein monster of Islam. It was always doomed, it was always folly.
When all of gains from “winning their hearts and minds” and the trillions in treasure and thousand of dead heroes can be instantly and completely wiped out by the promise of a two-bit Florida pastor to burn a Koran, there is no possible way for the West to win such a war.
When Bush hired the moron academic Noah Feldman to enshrine the Islamic sharia system into both constitutions for Iraq and Afghanistan, the war was lost. When we stopped instilling terror in the hearts of Muslims across the Muslim world and began “winning their hearts and minds” by giving them food and billions in aid, when we began rebuilding their their vile mosques, when we began appeasing the less murderous among them to try and alienate the more murderous among them, the war was lost.
We were attacked by Muslims who take their Koran and their Sharia very seriously. But rather than waging a war to destroy that enemy and his ideology, rather than taking the war directly to the vile serpents in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, and Pakistan, all of whom continue waging their Jihad unhindered, we set about “winning the hearts and minds” of the Muslim world.
There is no way to win this enemy’s heart or mind, not as long as Islam resides in either.
Less than zero has been accomplished: We have helped our enemy in myriad ways which we have not yet begun to contemplate, squandered the lives of thousands of our bravest, and flushed more $trillions into the bottomless maw of Islam. That is all we have done in nine long miserable years of stupidity and ignorance and staggering, stultifying waste.
The only difference between the democrats and Karzai is that Karzai does his election fraud right out in the open, and the democrats get people like ACORN to do theirs. It seems to me that the Afghanistan government and our are equally corrupt, we just don’t want to admit that ours is that corrupt.
One question: How much is needed to successfully back Malalai Joya, and her confreres, so that they are the ones calling the shots in Afghanistan?
One observation: the relationship between India and Iran can’t continue. Iran is abetting plenty of folk who don’t like the West all that much, and frankly I thought that India would have seen the experience of the Bombay bombings sink in
more deeply.
For India’s future is best served by deepening the roots the Magna Carta has set
in the sub-continent.
What horribly disappointing news this is! I have long been excited by the idea of regime change. I had hoped that something that worked so very well in Germany and Japan after World War II would also work in Iraq and Afghanistan. While Iraq seems to be stabilizing into some sort of democracy, Afghanistan apparently isn’t.
I can only hope that we find some way to “sell” the idea of democracy to the Afghans so that they see how valuable it is.
You want fraud in an election, wait until November 2nd!