Increasingly, the answer to that questions appears like it might be yes:
PUL-I-CHARKHI, Afghanistan — A Kabul teacher assigned to run a polling station in this village arrived at 6 a.m. on Election Day to find the ballot boxes already full, well before the voting was to start. When he protested, the other election officials told him to let it go; when he refused, he was taken away by the local tribal chieftain’s bodyguards.
Now he is in hiding and receiving threats, he said. And the village’s polling place is under investigation in one of the most serious reports of fraud that officials worry could affect the results of the country’s Aug. 20 elections — in this case, as in many others, in favor of President Hamid Karzai.
Afghan election officials said Sunday that the serious fraud reports that they were considering had suddenly doubled — to 550 from 270, in a development likely to stoke public outrage and perhaps even delay the official results past September. By law, each of the more serious cases, out of more than 2,000 complaints of irregularities so far, must be investigated before the elections results can be certified.
Western officials say they are increasingly ill at ease with the prospect of a national government in limbo even while American and NATO troops are pressed by the Taliban in a new phase of war that commanders concede is not going well.
“It does indicate there were a lot of allegations that have to be taken seriously, and if fraud did take place, that it was systematic,” said Martine van Bijlert, an analyst with The Afghanistan Analysts Network, an independent policy research organization. Concern was mounting among members of the international community, but there was uncertainty about how to deal with it, she said.
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International election observers who have been working for months in Afghanistan said the problem was not just individual cases of ballot stuffing, but systemic and institutional corruption. The election commission, supposedly independent, is heavily politicized, from the chairman down to local district officials appointed by the government, said one election observer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk publicly about the process. “The whole mechanism is flawed and the people in the system will perpetuate the fraud,” he said.
If this plays out the way that it appears that it’s going to, I don’t see how we can sit back and let Karzai and his cronies take power while our troops continue to die for their “freedom.” So, the choice will be either to involve ourselves in the insane internal politics or get the hell out and take care of the real problem, which happens to be in Pakistan at the moment.
