Yet this represents only a small part of the story. Across Afghanistan, there were roughly six times as many violent incidents as one would expect on a ‘normal’ late summer day, and it is now clear that this, along with a generalized fear of carnage, had a major impact on turnout, especially of women. In the entire province of Uruzgan, in which Australian troops are based, only 6 polling stations for women actually opened, meaning that only 3600 ballot papers were available for women. And in the province of Kandahar, informed international staff concluded that even a suggested turnout figure of 5 per cent was a gross exaggeration. This is part of a different and alarming story about what actually happened on polling day.
When turnout is low, an often-overlooked implication is that there are likely to be large numbers of blank ballot papers that can be put to nefarious use. And as time goes by, it seems more and more likely that Afghanistan’s troubled provinces of Kandahar, Uruzgan, Zabul, Ghazni and Helmand were witness to industrial-scale fraud, driven by backers of the president but facilitated by electoral staff who had been effectively suborned. Fraud on this scale not only puts the credibility of the election on the line, but poses a hideous challenge for the international community.
On the evening of 22 August, a report surfaced in Kabul that President Karzai had won over 70 per cent of the vote. Since turnout by all accounts was lowest in the areas where he had done best in 2004, and he had won only 55.4 per cent in 2004 when everything worked in his favour, such a figure (or indeed any figure that would give President Karzai a first-round victory) strains credulity to breaking-point. To those with long memories, it recalls the 1977 Pakistan election, when associates and supporters of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, keen to give him a memorable victory, did just that – producing an outcome so lopsided that it triggered Bhutto’s downfall. President Karzai may have been similarly ill-served by his supporters, since his personal standing will be permanently stained if he is perceived to have retained office on the strength of stuffed ballot boxes and falsified vote tallies. The real victims of all this, however, would be the ordinary people of Afghanistan.
It is difficult to overstate the threat that a corrupted election would pose to the prospects for Afghanistan’s transition. Some figures seem to think that Afghanistan has muddled through problems in the past, and that the same will happen this time. Such a sanguine approach fails to recognise that the 2009 election has brought Afghanistan to a fundamental tipping point in terms of governmental legitimacy.
Some (US) figures apparently fear that a second round of voting could sharpen ethnic rivalries. But a Karzai victory that was perceived to have been dependent on fraud would do far more to ignite ethnic tensions than any runoff could possibly do. Furthermore, the international community would lose all credibility in the eyes of many Afghans if it signed off on the result. But even more seriously, ordinary Afghans would likely give up all hope of being able to use peaceful, political means to procure political change. The main beneficiaries of this would of course be the Taliban.
In all the circumstances, a runoff election between the incumbent president and his main challenger seems not only the best, but probably the only, way of forestalling either a catastrophic political crisis, or the total loss of any momentum for Afghanistan’s state-building experiment. This will put enormous pressure in the coming weeks not only on the Electoral Complaints Commission, headed by Grant Kippen, but also on the US, the EU, the UN, and those actors in international society that purport to value both the idea of free and fair elections, and the fragile but evolving norms of democratic governance.
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on 25 August.
Professor Maley is Director of the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy, ANU.