Max Forte's List: Afghanistan Elections 2009

• A month before elections, a media monitoring unit alleges that the incumbent is unfairly dominating the airwaves
• Spend an evening watching national TV station Radio Television Afghanistan, RTA, and you may be forgiven for thinking that Afghanistan has just one prominent public figure: President Hamed Karzai.
• during a presidential election campaign, it borders on a gross violation of the election law,
• during the first two weeks of monitoring, Karzai was on the TV news 55 times; his closest rival, Abdullah Abdullah, was a distant second with 13 appearances. Ashraf Ghani, the only other challenger given a chance in the poll, enjoyed a mere six airings.
• Afghanistan’s increasingly chaotic campaign features 41 candidates with widely differing backgrounds, skills, and finances. Some, like Karzai and Abdullah, can afford to blanket the capital with posters and billboards, as well as taking out expensive television advertisements. A one-minute spot during prime time on the most popular station – the commercial channel Tolo – costs 600 US dollars.

3 more annotations...

• With elections due on August 20, pressure is mounting on Afghan journalists, and it's coming from all sides.
• attacks and abuse aimed at journalists as the elections approach

• What about threats and violence directed at his news crews?

    

  "There is increased sophistication in the ways they do intimidation. All the blunt instruments of harassment CPJ knows of. There are continuing problems with the insurgents, but a lot of our problems end up being with government. They use different ways of coming at us: We have a number of court cases about broadcasting Indian drama serials or retransmitting Al-Jazeera, and we expect more when they are unhappy with us. It's difficult when the judiciary is selected by the president' s office. They've charged us under the national security legislation for airing India serials--that sort of law is designed to go after the guys trying to blow up the country. The bottom line is the government feels it can do whatever it wants without real accountability."
• "Generally, but, sure, we have complaints from the other side as well. That pressure seems to be easier to manage. In some ways they seem to be much more media savvy. They seem to be more concerned about their relationship with the media than the government does," Mohseni told me.

• The other side being?

    

  "Well it depends, because there are the Taliban and other groups within the Taliban. There's no single group opposing the government in an armed fashion. There are clear cases of intimidation, and it's not all hunk-dory. ... There have been plenty of incidents of intimidation, people being shot at, but the intimidation isn't the same as it is with the government. I think it's largely because they understand they need media and they're very careful about how they go about treating us, whereas the government sees it otherwise.

3 more annotations...

• Afghan election commissions “code of conduct,” to be signed by journalists who want to be accredited to cover the upcoming vote
• No mentioning of corruption, then?
• this “code of conduct” could be used as a rather sweeping tool to close down or restrict media outlets that publish critical reports
• harassment and intimidation against the media is on the rise

2 more annotations...

• President Barack Obama's special envoy said Friday that Afghanistan's upcoming presidential contest will be imperfect, but the country cannot be held to a democratic standard that even the U.S. struggles to achieve.
• Richard Holbrooke's trip to this central Afghan province coincided with President Hamid Karzai's first election rally in Kabul ahead of the Aug. 20 ballot.
• "Elections here will be imperfect," Holbrooke said between briefings at a military base run by Polish and U.S. troops. "But I am an American who lived through an imperfect election eight years ago. I am not going to hold Afghanistan to standards which even the United States does not achieve."
• "This is not Iraq. This is not Vietnam. This is a nation that is directly related to the attacks of 9/11," Holbrooke said, referring to al-Qaida's attacks in New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001.

2 more annotations...

• In 2005, I was the youngest person elected to the new Afghan parliament. Women like me, running for office, were held up as an example of how the war in Afghanistan had liberated women. But this democracy was a facade, and the so-called liberation a big lie.
• It is my view that these British casualties, like the many thousands of Afghan civilian dead, are victims of the unjust policies that the Nato countries have pursued under the leadership of the US government.
• Almost eight years after the Taliban regime was toppled, our hopes for a truly democratic and independent Afghanistan have been betrayed by the continued domination of fundamentalists and by a brutal occupation that ultimately serves only American strategic interests in the region.
• the government headed by Hamid Karzai is full of warlords and extremists who are brothers in creed of the Taliban
• For expressing my views I have been expelled from my seat in parliament, and I have survived numerous assassination attempts.
• The fact that I was kicked out of office while brutal warlords enjoyed immunity from prosecution for their crimes should tell you all you need to know about the "democracy" backed by Nato troops.
• In the constitution it forbids those guilty of war crimes from running for high office. Yet Karzai has named two notorious warlords, Fahim and Khalili, as his running mates for the upcoming presidential election.
• Under the shadow of warlordism, corruption and occupation, this vote will have no legitimacy, and once again it seems the real choice will be made behind closed doors in the White House. As we say in Afghanistan, "the same donkey with a new saddle".
• Today the situation of women is as bad as ever. Victims of abuse and rape find no justice because the judiciary is dominated by fundamentalists
• This week, US vice-president Joe Biden asserted that "more loss of life [is] inevitable" in Afghanistan, and that the ongoing occupation is in the "national interests" of both the US and the UK.
• The Afghan people want peace, and history teaches that we always reject occupation and foreign domination.
• we know that values like human rights must be fought for and won by Afghans themselves.

10 more annotations...

• Just this week, the Obama administration first claimed it had no grounds to investigate General Abdul Rashid Dostum's infamous 2001 massacre of Taliban prisoners, even though Dostum seems to have been on the CIA payroll at the time, and his troops were backed by U.S. military operatives. Later, the president reversed course, ordering national security officials to "look into" the matter. In the end, President Obama may prefer to "move on." As does Dostum, who recently rejoined the Karzai administration.
• Ajmal's stricken father asks, "What kind of government doesn't protect its own citizens?" The answer is: a government that's bought, paid for, and answerable to outsiders, a government that has neither the need nor the inclination to care for its citizens.
• That's the government the international community is now spending more than $500 million to reelect. (Most of that money comes from the U.S.) International election officials, of course, are neutral -- so neutral that they look the other way as Karzai makes deals with rival warlords to ensure his reelection. One by one they come over to his side, and word leaks out about which ministries they've been promised.
• International agencies responsible for mounting the election have already abandoned the goal of a "free and fair" vote. They're aiming for "credible," which is to say, an election that looks pretty good, even if it's not. In the context of accumulated illusions, this goal is called "realistic," and perhaps it is. As the fixer's grieving father says, "Our government is a puppet of foreigners. That is why we expect nothing from it."

2 more annotations...

• "I have a country full of people who know what I know and believe what I believe; that we Afghans can govern ourselves without foreign interference."
• "There can never be lasting peace if the lives of Afghans are not valued as much as the lives of Western soldiers. Every death is a tragedy, but too often the Afghan victims of this war are merely nameless 'collateral damage' reported in the media as having been killed by 'mistake'."
• "Helmand is not the whole of Afghanistan. Even if they annihilate Taliban there, they should not call it a success because Taliban are logistically and militarily stabilised in hundreds of other parts of Afghanistan ... and growing stronger as each day dawns."
• "But it is the responsibility of our own people to fight for their rights, to achieve values like democracy and women's rights, human rights in our country. It's a prolonged struggle, it's a risky struggle full of hardships and challenges, but I trust in my people."
• One of the most widely-cited advantages of Nato's intervention has been improved conditions for Afghan women. Ms Joya disagrees. "Just as the US air strikes have not brought security to Afghans, nor has the occupation brought security to Afghan women. The reality is quite the opposite. The now infamous 'Family Law' is but the tip of the iceberg of the women's rights catastrophe in our occupied country. The whole system, and especially the judiciary, is infected with the virus of fundamentalism and so, in Afghanistan, men who commit crimes against women do so with impunity."
• Western "whitewash"
• "war criminals" who sit in the Afghan parliament
• so much of Afghanistan's reality has been kept veiled by a Western media consensus in support of the 'good war'," she says
• Next month's elections offer little hope of change, she believes, and will be tainted by vote-rigging. "It is clear that the future president is already chosen in Washington. As in the proverb of our people 'Same donkey but with a new saddle!'"

7 more annotations...

• Malalai Joya
• Ms Joya named those "enemies" as Nato forces who bomb from the sky, the resurgent Islamists of the Taliban, and the country's "warlords".
• she dismissed next month's presidential election as a "deception".
• Ms Joya technically remains an MP, but has been suspended since 2007, on charges of insulting the parliament after she compared it to a zoo.
• there is no functioning democracy in Afghanistan under current conditions
• "The election is a showcase for the US government to deceive people around the world,"
• "We have a proverb - an old donkey but a new saddle,"

• "No nation can donate liberation to another nation," Ms Joya said, to loud applause from the audience.

  "Only nations which liberate themselves can be free."

6 more annotations...

• It is not good enough for the defence secretary, Bob Ainsworth, to strike Churchillian tones by saying the way forward will be hard and dangerous, and then plead for public forbearance. The business of government is to set a goal and provide a strategy for getting there. In Afghanistan we have neither. And the British public's tolerance is running on a timer.
• British soldiers are notionally dying to allow a national election to take place in Helmand. Unless miracles happen, this poll will usher in four more years of a corrupt narco-regime whose leader, Hamid Karzai, is the not-so-private despair of everyone from Barack Obama downwards.
• Mr Karzai's re-election could trigger a violent backlash from Afghans yearning for a government they can trust
• Colonel David Haight put it pithily: "Four more years of this crap?"
• Mr Karzai
• continues to be confident of victory, even an outright one in the first round. He should be, because he has placed his loyalists in the election commission. The only question is whether the Afghan voters are so fed up with this that they will defy their clan elders and vote him out.
• Let us all be clear. As things stand, we are losing this war, not just because the Taliban show more resilience, nor simply because people like Mr Karzai and his family thrive off the instability their rule creates. We are losing because a coalition spending $20bn a month on military operations has - after eight painful and bloody years - no political strategy for reaching its stated goals. Afghanistan is not the only country whose government is failing. Successive British governments that mouth platitudes about the sacrifice their troops make fail them time and time again.

5 more annotations...

• General Petraeus's oft-cited military formula is not the key to success in Afghanistan
• From the surge in 2007 in Iraq to Afghanistan today, allied military strategy in both conflicts has been focused on three words that have been iterated and reiterated at each crisis and turning point. Those words are "clear, hold, build", representing the credo of General David Petraeus's Field Manual 3-24 on Counterinsurgency (pdf), first published in 2006.
• Clear
• The problem, however, with the notion of "clearing" is that it assumes that the Taliban are somehow "other" to the rest of the population, not least in the Pashtun south. But the reality, whether we like it or not, is that the social and cultural values represented by the Taliban have large areas of cross-over with substantial sections of the rest of Afghanistan.
• what is being earmarked for excision represents often commonly shared values – a policy that risks inflaming the conflict rather than "pacifying" it.
• Their argument in Afghanistan – as in Iraq – is that those opposing coalition efforts can be separated into categories: those absolutely committed to fighting who must be killed or otherwise taken out of the equation; and those less committed or those who fight for money, who can be discouraged by the elimination of the first group
• it ignores the social organisation, cohesion and strong kinship relationships in Afghanistan, as well as the reciprocal obligations
• over the last few years, US and UK estimates have proved to be consistently wrong about the numbers, concentrations in locations and levels of local support for Taliban fighters – and why people are supporting them.
• There has been a failure to grasp even why individuals are fighting.

• Hold

  I
• Despite eight years in Afghanistan, and a procession of campaigns, US and UK forces are no closer to holding the ground than they were three years ago.
• inevitably, the Taliban returns more determined, more knowledgeable about their enemy and with ever more effective weapons.
• And given the increasingly wide distribution of the violence, the policy of holding requires ever greater troop levels, suggesting to the population an occupation ever more determined. And in doing so, it poses the risk of an ever more intensified resistance.
• Build
• Eight years of largely wasted effort in Afghanistan have barely made an impact on its multiple conflicts and challenges – for which the coming elections will once again be presented as a fig leaf.

13 more annotations...

• August's presidential election in Afghanistan could be more competitive than many observers have been predicting. For months, it seemed that President Hamid Karzai was virtually certain to win re-election, but an apparent recent surge in support for two of Karzai's rivals has opened the prospect that he could be forced into a runoff.
• what if Karzai — long thought of as America's man in Afghanistan — were to lose?
• Alexander Thier, a senior adviser at the U.S. Institute of Peace, says "the Afghan people are skeptical because of our long and uncritical support" of Karzai.
• "Karzai is working with a lot of people who have enough money to win the election — the old warlords who've accumulated a lot of ill-gotten U.S. cash."
• Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who just returned from Afghanistan, warns that poll numbers in Afghanistan are unreliable, offering little more than "a dim indication" of public opinion.

3 more annotations...

• The August 20 presidential vote, only the second in Afghan history, is seen as a crucial test in the nearly eight-year effort led by the United States and NATO to stabilise Afghanistan since the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban.
• Haroun Mir, analyst from the Afghanistan Centre for Research and Policy Studies in Kabu
• 67 troop deaths so far in July
• "There will be 7,000 voting centres in Afghanistan and I think neither the Afghan government nor coalition forces have enough personnel to provide security for each of these voting stations," he told AFP.
• The consequences, he said, will be that people stay away from the polls, or the legitimacy of the ballot will be called into question with election monitors also scarce.

3 more annotations...

• The Democratic strategist and former President Clinton’s key adviser has joined the campaign of one of President Karzai’s challenger, Ashraf Ghani. Ghani is a former finance minister and was an analyst at  the World Bank.
• Carville’s objective is to try to get his candidate into a second round against Karzai. The political strategist is already in full attack mode against the current President, he made the following statement about Afghanistan: ” Just because it has a failed president doesn’t mean it has to be a failed country.”
• James Carville, when asked by NPR, declined to say if he was getting paid for his work.
• has helped other candidates in various international elections in the past
• it could make Karzai’s re-election bid easier by making Ghani appears to be the candidate endorsed by the US
• It will also, in a likely win by Karzai, make dealing with Karzai a lot more difficult for Richard Holbrooke and the Obama administration

4 more annotations...

• The weakness of state institutions, the deteriorating security situation and the fractured political scene are all highlighted by – and will likely have a dramatic effect on – the electoral process.
• The years since the last poll saw the Afghan government and international community fail to embed a robust electoral framework and drive democratisation at all levels.
• The Afghan government, UN and donors failed to use the interim period to build the capacity and resources of the IEC; strengthen the legal framework including replacing the inappropriate Single Non-Transferable Vote (SNTV) system; and produce a sustainable voter registry.
• increased popular disillusionment and thus reduced buy-in for the state-building agenda, including potentially election participation
• a highly centralised political patronage system in which the head of state wields enormous powers, bringing personalities rather than policies to the fore
• lack of an accepted constitutional arbiter in case of dispute
• The insurgency, centred in the south and east of the country, may affect the ability of people in such areas to freely exercise their franchise and makes scrutiny of the process much more difficult, increasing opportunities for fraud.
• here are 41 candidates running in the presidential poll – most prominent in challenging Hamid Karzai are former foreign minister and leading Northern Alliance personality Abdullah Abdullah and former World Bank official and finance minister Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai. The large number of candidates – about 3,300 (10 per cent of them women) – for the provincial councils provides ample evidence of continued interest in the process.
• The voter registration update, while adding some momentum to the process, failed to address striking flaws in the voter registry which could lay the groundwork for fraud and which the international community has not spoken up about.

7 more annotations...

• The Afghan government has agreed a truce with Taliban insurgents in the north-western province of Badghis ahead of elections next month, officials say.
• The Taliban have pledged not to attack voting centres and to hand key areas to government forces, officials say. There has been no word from the militants.
• the UK is emphasising that more must be done to engage moderate members of the Taliban

• Foreign Secretary David Miliband announced the shift of emphasis in the UK's Afghanistan strategy in a speech to Nato.

  He stressed the Afghan government must do more to talk to moderate members of the Taliban as part of a broader political process.

• But it would not be the first time the Afghan government has tried to engage the Taliban.

  In October 2008, President Hamid Karzai's brother confirmed a BBC report that he had met former members of the Taliban in Saudi Arabia as part of a first step towards peace talks.
• There are grave concerns about security across the country ahead of presidential and provincial council elections on 20 August.

4 more annotations...

• Hundreds of polling stations could be closed in Afghanistan's most violent regions, raising concerns that many ethnic Pashtuns will be unable to vote in next month's presidential elections.
• Afghan authorities plan to establish about 7,000 polling centers across the country for the Aug. 20 balloting. But security officials are unsure whether voting can take place in about 700 of them, said Noor Mohammad Noor, a spokesman for the Independent Electoral Commission.
• At least 500 will probably not open because of security fears, according to a Western official working on the elections.
• Taliban spokesmen have called on Afghans not to vote in the election but have not explicitly threatened to attack polling stations.
• With so much uncertainty, the top U.N. official in Afghanistan, Kai Eide, called the upcoming ballot "the most complicated elections I have seen."
• About 17 million registered voters are eligible to vote for Afghanistan's next president and provincial council members
• Even without the threat of violence, the logistics of setting up polling centers in an impoverished country of deserts, towering mountains, few roads and poor infrastructure are challenging.

5 more annotations...

• The Taliban urged Afghans on Thursday to stay away from the Aug. 20 elections, threatening to block the roads to polling stations and dismissing the balloting as an "American process."
• "All those Afghans should stand together with the Islamic emirate and should not participate in this American process," the Taliban said in a statement. The Islamic emirate is the name used by Taliban groups loyal to Mullah Omar.
• Hundreds of polling stations are likely to remain shut on the election date, almost all in areas dominated by Pashtuns, the biggest ethnic group and the backbone of the Taliban. A low Pashtun turnout could call the legitimacy of the election results into question.

1 more annotation...

• Abdullah's campaign manager last week predicted street violence if Abdullah doesn't win, contending that Karzai can't prevail unless he steals the vote. Abdullah distanced himself from the comments, saying it wasn't his view or that of his supporters
• hreats of campaign violence — combined with several deadly attacks on candidates' campaign teams in recent days — are partial indicators that Afghans are not likely to view the election process as "credible and legitimate," said Candace Rondeaux, an Afghanistan expert for the International Crisis Group