Widespread Fraud Alleged in Afghan Election
Iranian support likely went to benefit candidates tied to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his Hezb-i-Islami party. Hekmatyar is a long-time friend of the Iranian regime who has received extensive backing from them for years. He isn’t the official leader of the Afghan party, but the candidates openly support him and say the only reason he isn’t their chief is because he’s outside of the country. Hekmtatyar has also cultivated ties to the Taliban and al-Qaeda and is an insurgent leader.
On September 20, the Taliban’s shadow government, called the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, bragged that they had foiled the election, carrying out 739 attacks across the country. This number may not be much of an exaggeration. One security firm in Kabul estimates that there were up to 600 attacks and that a “fairly huge amount of polling centers” had been shut down. In one incident, the Taliban laid down a chain around the area of the polling station and refused to let aspiring voters cross. Eleven civilians, three Afghan cops, and 27 terrorists died on election day.
Unfortunately, the democratic culture just hasn’t taken hold in Afghanistan. One account from AOL News reads:
As one Afghan journalist said to me, very few people were voting for the “right” reasons or even truly understand what democracy means. Most were voting along tribal and ethnic lines or perhaps for the local powerbroker or militia leader, for whom the legislative process is simply power politics by other means.
Part of the problem is that political parties aren’t organized or valued. Almost all of the candidates ran as independents and not as part of any type of bloc or collective. As a result, Karzai and his cronies and other figures control the process. Their families own the businesses that can fund campaigns and the government ministries that employ workers. Karzai is the only one with an apparatus to mount a campaign because he controls the government.
Karzai’s opponent in the presidential election, Abdullah Abdullah, has sought to create a democratic political movement in Afghanistan to fill this gap called the National Alliance for Change and Hope. A European government was reportedly interested in helping him, but decided against it when they saw that he was bankrupt and had no real strategy. He boasted of supporting 300 candidates during this last election but admitted he couldn’t support them financially. He strikes an optimistic tone, saying: “We have just laid the foundation for the National Alliance for Change and Hope. That’s very young.” But he has a long way to go to create the dynamics and institutions necessary for a democracy.
The crumbling of Afghanistan’s democracy is a very sad loss. The country is relatively pro-American and is very much against the Taliban. But the fraud in the Taliban-controlled areas indicates there cannot be credible elections until their control is completely wrested. And then the inadequate culture and institutions for democracy will still remain. The National Alliance for Change and Hope is a sign that the desire exists, but there is a long, tough road ahead to an Afghan democracy. And the American people are only willing to travel that road to the next traffic light.
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!