Simon Jenkins: Today's Afghan election is a moment of truth for zealous liberal aggressors
[Simon Jenkins is a British journalist and author.]
During the last Afghan elections, a UN official outside a polling booth grabbed a voter's blue-stained finger and raised it before the cameras. "Look," he said ecstatically. "This is what it's all about."
No, it isn't. Even in its present belligerent stance, the western world does not go about bombing and killing people just so they can vote. The Afghan war and occupation were about punishing the Taliban for harbouring Osama bin Laden and to prevent them ever doing it again. The punishment was delivered. The prevention was, and remains, ill-conceived and elusive.
No believer in self-government can decry the vote. It remains the essential ritual of democratic grace. Tomorrow's election reflects the aspirations of millions of Afghans. It is an advance on the earlier Islamist fundamentalism and offers voters both a choice of leader and an opportunity, albeit at great personal risk, to share in the national polity.
Even the likely triumph of Hamid Karzai as president does not invalidate this cause. For a nation as poor as Afghanistan to tolerate a contested election that embraces Ashraf Ghani, the darling of the Kabul NGOs, is an achievement, even if impossible without the presence of a huge foreign army. Any distraction from the politics of death, destruction and corruption must be welcome.
Voting is one thing, elections another. tomorrow's election will make no difference to the ramshackle structure of government in what, nearly eight years after the Nato invasion, is a wholly dysfunctional state. While western diplomats are right to protest that no one should expect a lily-white poll in such a country, the awesome scale of electoral pollution should make even nation-building's most ardent defenders pause to think.
Reports are rife of vote selling, ballot rigging and general chicanery. Karzai's running mate is the dubious warlord Mohammad Qasim Fahim, and he has allowed back the brutal Tajik leader Abdul Rashid Dostum from well-deserved exile. Low turnout in the Taliban-dominated centre and south may well tilt Kabul towards the non-Pashtun north, distorting national politics.
As Malalai Joya, a brave young member of parliament, said recently on a tour in Britain, Afghanistan is a kleptocracy rather than a functioning democracy. Her assertion, that people (especially women) are no better off than under the Taliban, is not for outsiders to contest.
This will further enhance emerging local Taliban leaders as defenders of the Pashtuns against the Karzai regime. With violence increasing, Kabul is readying itself for what may again be its fate, sooner rather than later, as a besieged city awash in old divisions and conflicts, which the west is powerless to avert.
Britain has no real dog in this fight. Ever more bombs explode across British-occupied Helmand, and mayhem rules the day. There is no grimmer testament to the failure of three years of "hearts and minds" than that only three of Helmand's 13 electoral districts are reportedly safe for election monitors to attend. Barely half the province's voters can be assured an open polling station. The Taliban is everywhere and the idea, much touted by British ministers, that this is "ridding the streets of Britain of the terrorist menace" is absurd.
Even if the Taliban cared to disrupt the streets of Britain, which they do not, the Afghan operation must constitute the biggest incitement to global mischief ever invented. As the Guardian's Ghaith Abdul-Ahad has been writing this week, a nation that under the Taliban was introverted and passive (save for its unwitting role in 9/11 as host to Bin Laden) is now a magnet for international killers and fanatics. British policy, whatever it was, simply has not worked. It has failed. No amount of platitudes from London or Washington can alter that.
This election should be a moment of truth for liberal interventionists everywhere. To cruise the world instigating elections at the point of a gun may have conferred neocon street cred on George Bush and Tony Blair. It has met its nemesis in the partition of Yugoslavia, the reversion of Iraq to feuding religious rivalry, and the chaos of Afghanistan. Other theatres of this missionary zeal – Pakistan, Palestine, Sudan and, in a different sense, Iran and Burma – are not glowing advertisements for the policy. Who knows where it will next bless with democracy at the blast from a drone?..
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
During the last Afghan elections, a UN official outside a polling booth grabbed a voter's blue-stained finger and raised it before the cameras. "Look," he said ecstatically. "This is what it's all about."
No, it isn't. Even in its present belligerent stance, the western world does not go about bombing and killing people just so they can vote. The Afghan war and occupation were about punishing the Taliban for harbouring Osama bin Laden and to prevent them ever doing it again. The punishment was delivered. The prevention was, and remains, ill-conceived and elusive.
No believer in self-government can decry the vote. It remains the essential ritual of democratic grace. Tomorrow's election reflects the aspirations of millions of Afghans. It is an advance on the earlier Islamist fundamentalism and offers voters both a choice of leader and an opportunity, albeit at great personal risk, to share in the national polity.
Even the likely triumph of Hamid Karzai as president does not invalidate this cause. For a nation as poor as Afghanistan to tolerate a contested election that embraces Ashraf Ghani, the darling of the Kabul NGOs, is an achievement, even if impossible without the presence of a huge foreign army. Any distraction from the politics of death, destruction and corruption must be welcome.
Voting is one thing, elections another. tomorrow's election will make no difference to the ramshackle structure of government in what, nearly eight years after the Nato invasion, is a wholly dysfunctional state. While western diplomats are right to protest that no one should expect a lily-white poll in such a country, the awesome scale of electoral pollution should make even nation-building's most ardent defenders pause to think.
Reports are rife of vote selling, ballot rigging and general chicanery. Karzai's running mate is the dubious warlord Mohammad Qasim Fahim, and he has allowed back the brutal Tajik leader Abdul Rashid Dostum from well-deserved exile. Low turnout in the Taliban-dominated centre and south may well tilt Kabul towards the non-Pashtun north, distorting national politics.
As Malalai Joya, a brave young member of parliament, said recently on a tour in Britain, Afghanistan is a kleptocracy rather than a functioning democracy. Her assertion, that people (especially women) are no better off than under the Taliban, is not for outsiders to contest.
This will further enhance emerging local Taliban leaders as defenders of the Pashtuns against the Karzai regime. With violence increasing, Kabul is readying itself for what may again be its fate, sooner rather than later, as a besieged city awash in old divisions and conflicts, which the west is powerless to avert.
Britain has no real dog in this fight. Ever more bombs explode across British-occupied Helmand, and mayhem rules the day. There is no grimmer testament to the failure of three years of "hearts and minds" than that only three of Helmand's 13 electoral districts are reportedly safe for election monitors to attend. Barely half the province's voters can be assured an open polling station. The Taliban is everywhere and the idea, much touted by British ministers, that this is "ridding the streets of Britain of the terrorist menace" is absurd.
Even if the Taliban cared to disrupt the streets of Britain, which they do not, the Afghan operation must constitute the biggest incitement to global mischief ever invented. As the Guardian's Ghaith Abdul-Ahad has been writing this week, a nation that under the Taliban was introverted and passive (save for its unwitting role in 9/11 as host to Bin Laden) is now a magnet for international killers and fanatics. British policy, whatever it was, simply has not worked. It has failed. No amount of platitudes from London or Washington can alter that.
This election should be a moment of truth for liberal interventionists everywhere. To cruise the world instigating elections at the point of a gun may have conferred neocon street cred on George Bush and Tony Blair. It has met its nemesis in the partition of Yugoslavia, the reversion of Iraq to feuding religious rivalry, and the chaos of Afghanistan. Other theatres of this missionary zeal – Pakistan, Palestine, Sudan and, in a different sense, Iran and Burma – are not glowing advertisements for the policy. Who knows where it will next bless with democracy at the blast from a drone?..