Getting the vote out

Afghanistan

Jun 30th 2005 KABUL
From The Economist print edition

Parliamentary elections are still on track

CHILDREN dressed in national costume were the stars last weekend at a televised lottery in Kabul's Intercontinental Hotel ballroom that was designed to demonstrate the transparency of Afghanistan's elections scheduled for September 18th. They spent two days picking 6,000 names from cardboard boxes to fix the order in which candidates would appear on ballot papers for the 249-seat Wolesi Jirga (lower house of parliament) and for 34 provincial councils. A computerised random selection would have taken only a few minutes but, said Peter Erben, who runs a joint United Nations-Afghan government election secretariat, “we wanted to demonstrate what it means to have free and open elections”.

Symbolism and some semblance of order are seen as important in a country that has no tradition of democratic government and whose emergence from decades of war and unrest has been upset in recent weeks by a significant resurgence of violence. Security forces have been stepping up their attacks and more than 200 militants have been reported killed along with more than 70 American troops and Afghan police, including 17 American personnel who died in a helicopter crash on June 29th.

Some western officials suggest that action by security forces, plus an increasing number of Taliban activists surrendering under an amnesty scheme, could gradually reduce the militants' effectiveness. But Afghan leaders, both inside and outside the government of President Hamid Karzai, blame Pakistan for encouraging the unrest in a bid to upset the elections and destabilise the country's recovery in the longer term. In two telephone calls with President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan on June 21st and 23rd, Mr Karzai requested increased Pakistani efforts to stop Taliban militants crossing into Afghanistan.

Meanwhile the country's many local armed commanders are expected to try to undermine the election in other ways, using cash or coercion to garner votes for themselves or their candidates. “People are so poor, so hungry, that they will vote for people who pay them,” says Fatima Gailani, chairman of Afghan Red Crescent Society. Election authorities have threatened to ban 255 candidates with links to warlords unless they disarm. The number has been reduced in the past week and a final list is to be published on July 2nd.

So far, the increase in violence has not significantly hindered the election preparations, although two officials have been killed and a voter registration office has been attacked. Nearly 11m voters were registered for presidential polls last October, when Mr Karzai was elected, and officials estimate that this could increase by a further 2m during the current registration exercise. Mr Erben says that the logistics of working in remote mountain areas, often accessible only by mules, and the relatively short time left till September 18th, both pose more immediate problems at this stage than the violence.

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