Prime Minister Harper addresses Canadian troops in Afghanistan

Just a week after refusing to entertain the idea of a runoff election, it appears sufficient pressure has been applied to Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai from his international patrons, that he has been forced to accept what many have considered inevitable for the past two months; a second round of voting for the dubious honor of presiding over the beleaguered nation.

The initial results of the original election on September 20, 2009 immediately showed troubling signs of massive voter fraud throughout the country. A two month investigation by a United Nations backed panel, the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC), validated many of the hundreds of officially lodged complaints of widespread vote rigging. According to their statement, the ECC found “clear and convincing evidence of fraud relating to improperly recorded vote totals for candidates,” and ordered ballots from 210 polling stations invalidated.

Many of the complaints had been laid by Karzai’s main challenger, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, who continued to voice serious charges the government had perpetrated a nation wide hoax on its citizenry and the international community, by falsifying the results in order to ensure Karzai retained control of the government, even as many powerful voices inside and outside the country were hailing the vote as a vindication of the need to sustain the Afghan mission, and that it was a forceful repudiation for those who had prematurely claimed the dream of a free and democratic Afghanistan was wildly unrealistic.

The EEC, despite Karzai’s dogged denials, conclusively determined that the initial vote results which gave the incumbent President a 55% majority victory in the election were in fact obscenely fraudulent, which only added to the already enormous international pressure on him to accept the necessity for a second round of voting to elect a legitimate leader.

For many observers, this obvious and ill conceived fraud was little more than the latest measure of the incompetence and desperation of the Karzai government to cling to power, a government which seems to be incapable of exerting any more influence inside Kabul than it has outside the confines of the capital, which is to all extents and purposes, none.

U.S. President Obama has today (October 28, 2009) signed a defense bill which includes a provision to allow American military commanders in Afghanistan to pay Taliban fighters to formally give up their armed resistance to foreign troops and the Karzai government, in a strategy widely employed in Iraq in the prelude to last year’s U.S. troop ‘surge.’

All of which follows on the heels of increased Taliban attacks throughout Afghanistan, culminating in today’s assault on a United Nations compound which killed 5 UN staff members and 3 Afghans, and leaves the issue of the additional 40,000 US troops requested by American Commander Stanley McChrystal, very much in limbo, while not forgetting to mention the increasingly unstable situation across the border in Pakistan which continues to be a major contributor to the growing sense of unease in the region.

The upshot of all this sobering news is that the decision by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to not commit further Canadian combat troops to Afghanistan beyond their stated withdrawal date of 2011, is looking very much like a prescient and sage one to be sure.

Few analysts are suggesting that a second round of Afghan elections will not exhibit the same problems as the first, though likely not as overtly or as many. Yet one would be hard pressed to find anyone who is willing to opine that the new round of voting will be free of corruption, or that the latest series of attacks by the Taliban will not have a more chilling effect on the hapless population, which already produced a low voter turnout due to intimidation and fear of reprisals on September 20th.

Canadians have never been as forcefully supportive of their military’s involvement in Afghanistan, certainly not to the extent their American counterparts had been, and after eight long years of war, neither population appears to have very much patience in reserve for what is generally thought to be an open ended conflict with little or no legitimate short or long term goals, and an ever shrinking window of opportunity for success, even if such a thing could be measured, which hardly anyone currently believes is possible.

What is clear, is that the Bush administration’s interest in Iraq so successfully drained resources and manpower from the fight in Afghanistan at such a critical point in the conflict and for such an extended period, that whatever gains may have been attainable in the initial months or even years of the war, have long since faded into what appears to be a vast black hole of despair.

The Karzai government is rife with corruption, foreign troops are viewed with suspicion as invaders and occupiers propping up a puppet administration, the opium trade is booming, the Taliban are reconstituting stronger and more ruthless than ever and there is little of the promised stability and quality of life improvements to show frustrated Afghans after nearly a decade of war.

Many Canadian analysts have maintained that were Mr. Harper to enjoy the position of strength afforded him by a majority government, his decision regarding Canada’s military commitment to Afghanistan may well have taken a much different and more enduring direction.

With what is looking more and more like a conflict that offers little hope of winning, but an almost unlimited variety of losing, a growing majority of Canadians are simply relieved that sometimes good government resolutions can come from minority packages.

Related posts:

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2. Bloc, NDP Challenge Mackay on Afghanistan Testifying before Canada’s national defence committee on the Hill two...
3. Canada’s Top Commander Jonathan Vance Voices Concerns About The Afghan Mission Brigadier-General Jonathon Vance, Canada’s commander in Afghanistan, has been the...
4. Is Afghanistan Our Vietnam War? As the Canadian death toll in Afghanistan increases and days...
5. Is 2011 a Realistic Date for the Withdrawal of Troops in Afghanistan? The last few weeks have seen a flurry of promises,...

Tags: afghanistan, election, hamid karzai, voter fraud

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 5:12 pm and is filed under Foreign Affairs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.