Afghan Vote: Dangerous Ink Stains
By Anuj Chopra for ISN
About a week ago, when Afghan President Hamid Karzai was releasing his manifesto in Kabul in the run-up to the 20 August presidential elections, 70 kilometers away, the Taliban clearly demonstrated their sabotage capabilities.
A group of Taliban fighters - some disguised as women concealing suicide vests under their burqas, others wielding automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenade launchers - stormed a shopping center abutting the police headquarters of Pul-e-Alam, the capital of external pageLogar Province, just south of Kabul.
Smoke billowed out of the building; loud explosions sent shivers down the spines of local residents as a gun battle raged for hours between the Taliban and Afghan and US forces, killing more than half a dozen people.
The twisted and mangled remains of cars still litter the parking lot of the bullet-pocked shopping center.
To Syed Najeebullah, a local boxing instructor, the attack was an ominous sign that the Taliban, whose presence in the region is growing stronger by the day, is serious about its threat to disrupt tomorrow’s elections.
He has seen Taliban notices pinned on the walls of nearly all of Pul-e-Alam’s masjids, sternly warning locals against heading to the polls. In recent days, the Taliban have launched rocket attacks on some of the 83 polling stations in Logar province.
“Who will dare to go vote?” he told ISN Security Watch. “I don’t want to be caught by the Taliban with an ink stain on my finger.”
Afghanistan’s deteriorating security situation poses the single biggest obstacle to tomorrow’s presidential election. A nearly eight-year-old Taliban-led insurgency has reached its most violent level in the country. A large number of Afghans, especially those in the countryside, find it almost impossible to cast their vote amid the growing threats and a lack of security.
The Karzai government has assured Afghans it is safe to vote. Wali Karzai, the incumbent president’s controversial half-brother, says he has brokered ceasefire deals with some Taliban commanders in southern Afghanistan. But the Taliban has rubbished such claims.
Braving the ballot
As you drive away from Pul-e-Alam along shale-brown hills to the rural interiors of Logar province, concrete roads morph into rutted donkey trails. Government and military presence conspicuously diminishes. The Taliban rules the hinterland.
Sinister anti-election edicts posted on the mud and clay walls of village homes are very common.
“The Taliban has declared this election illegal. Those fingers found stained with election ink will be chopped off,” reads one of them written in Dari.
“We will aim rockets at polling stations. Do not go out to vote,” reads another.
“The Taliban come when it is dark,” Davajan, a middle-aged farmer from Purak village, told ISN Security Watch.
They come on motorcycles to hold night meetings with villagers, and sermons in the local mosques, he said. Scores of villagers have chosen not to obtain voter ID cards. The few that obtained them tore them up, fearing they would be caught with them by the Taliban.
“This is what they tell us to do,” he said, darting his finger at a mud wall with a Taliban warning in blue ink. “How can you defy them?”
“Will the police come to protect those that did?” he asked.
Ghulam Nadi Charkhi, assistant chief of police of Logar province admitted the police “cannot cover the province 100 percent.”
“If we get a call from a far-flung village, we might not be able to go protect them,” he told ISN Security Watch in his fortified headquarters in Pul-e-Alam.
The newly trained Afghan police force isn’t in sufficient numbers to cover a million-strong population, he pointed out.
However, he was quick to qualify that, in general, though fewer in numbers, and overstretched, the police force was very capable of tackling the growing Taliban threat, just perhaps not on election day.
“It took many days for the well-equipped Indian police to neutralize terrorists in last year’s Mumbai attack. We managed to neutralize the Taliban in a matter of hours,” he said, referring to the recent shopping mall attack.
“But western countries will have to step up training of Afghan police to ensure better security,” he said.
More vulnerable than ever
President Barack Obama has external pagebolstered the US troop presence in Afghanistan by sending thousands of additional troops this February. As part of his new Afghan strategy, 21,000 more are expected to arrive by the year end, bringing the total troop strength to 68,000.
But despite the new surge, some analysts say it won’t be enough to quell the Taliban insurgency.
“If western forces send thousands of troops and pump billions of dollars into Afghanistan, that is not going to bring peace in Afghanistan,” Rahimullah Samandar, the head of Afghanistan’s Independent Journalist Association, told ISN Security Watch. “Insurgents control nearly half the country.”
Look at the Kabul-Kandahar highway, a well-paved, two-lane highway connecting two of Afghanistan’s biggest cities, built in recent years by Afghanistan’s western backers.
“But of what use is it if Afghans cannot travel freely on it,” he said, pointing out the rising cases of Taliban attacks on commuters. “After bloody years, Afghans feel more vulnerable than ever.”
In an informal poll Samander’s organization conducted in southern Afghanistan, the most restive area of the country, a majority of Afghans evinced a desire for government talks with the Taliban.
Military action against the Taliban is akin to nailing jelly to the wall, he said.
Karzai, if re-elected, in a peace overture to the Taliban has promised to invite them to the external pageLoya Jirga, the country’s grand assembly of tribal chiefs. Peace talks with the Taliban have been one of his chief campaign pledges. But the Taliban has ruled out talks unless foreign troops leave Afghanistan.
Transparency obstacles
There are about 35 candidates running in the presidential poll, and Karzai is clearly the most prominent. His candidature is challenged mainly by external pageAbdullah Abdullah, a leading personality from the Northern Alliance, and external pageAshraf Ghani Ahmadzai, a former World Bank official and finance minister.
The streets of Kabul are festooned with election banners, a sign of the high-octane campaign.
A whopping $230 million is being pumped in by the international community, mainly the US, to conduct these elections.
But widespread election fraud is suspected. The Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan (FEFA) has reported cases of external pagethousands of fake and multiple voter ID cards circulating around Afghanistan.
FEFA’s 8,000 observers have expressed frustration about their inability to monitor cases of election fraud across the 29,000 polling stations, raising fears of a deeply flawed election.
It will only be possible to monitor 70 percent of those polling stations, as the rest are completely impossible to reach “due to security reasons.”
And the 250 foreign observers from the US and EU will only be able to monitor 30 percent of all polling stations for similar reasons, according to external pageAfghanistan’s Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening, a nongovernmental organization.
Development, the cruel joke
In the busy bazaar of Pul-e-Alam, a billboard overlooks the main arterial road leading up to Logar province. “Please vote and be a part of the reconstruction of Afghanistan,” it implores passersby.
The message is a cruel joke, some locals say, who have seen few signs of development in the last eight years.
Too few ordinary Afghans are benefiting from international aid efforts in their country, with a third of the population at risk of hunger, international aid agency Oxfam warned this week. Although billions of dollars have been pumped into Afghanistan, it has been “woefully insufficient to deal with legacy of three decades of conflict and chaos.”
Forty percent of Afghans live below the poverty line. One woman dies every 30 minutes as a result of pregnancy or childbirth complications. And nearly 7.3 million people are at risk of hunger and chronic food shortages. The situation is made worse by the conflict, which renders many areas off limits to aid workers. The US spends $100 million a day on security, but the overall aid budget is less than $7 million per day.
“The international community has promised a lot to the Afghan people but much aid and reconstruction has failed to live up to those promises,” Grace Ommer, external pageOxfam Great Britain’s country director for Afghanistan said in a statement.
“Donors have double-pledged funds and have been slow to disburse aid money, a situation compounded by inefficiency, lack of accountability and corruption. Aid that does reach Afghanistan often doesn’t reach the people it’s meant to help, or it is spent on projects which fulfill donor’s priorities, rather than Afghan needs.”