Peter W. Galbraith, who was fired last week from his position with the UN as deputy special representative in Afghanistan, has come out swinging with a hard hitting piece in the Washington Post deriding the United Nation’s work in securing a free and fair Afghan Presidential Election. Galbraith, who was basically fired by UN special representative to Afghanistan Kai Eide, scathingly denounces the August Presidential election as fraught with fraud that secured another term for President Hamid Karzai and blames the United Nations for failing to publicly support such a conclusion. Well, now free from his UN post, Galbraith has decided to take his story and claim that the election was tainted beyond the pale to the American public. Here’s a powerful segment:
Afghanistan’s presidential election, held Aug. 20, should have been a milestone in the country’s transition from 30 years of war to stability and democracy. Instead, it was just the opposite. As many as 30 percent of Karzai’s votes were fraudulent, and lesser fraud was committed on behalf of other candidates. In several provinces, including Kandahar, four to 10 times as many votes were recorded as voters actually cast. The fraud has handed the Taliban its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United States and its Afghan partners.
Galbraith claims that Eide refused to denounce the election results and numerous cases of fraud because he feared it would inflame ethnic tensions. Galbraith of course has a different take and that is that an election seen as illegitimate by many in the country, especially Tajiks in the north, would undermine the Karzai government and as was stated ‘hand the Taliban its greatest victory.’ I personally sympathize with both arguments, but the accusations of voter fraud that Galbraith describes in the rest of his piece push one toward his position. He showcases these occurrences below as examples of serious voter fraud in the August election:
– Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission (IEC), which was in charge of verifying the legitimacy of every vote and the election as a whole, was subservient to Karzai.
– At least 1,500 polling centers (out of 7,000) were to be located in places so insecure that no one from the IEC, the Afghan National Army or the Afghan National Police had ever visited them.
– Local commission staff members, who had access to many ballots and control over voting centers, were inexperienced, unchecked, and likely to be ‘simply agents of the local power brokers, usually aligned with Karzai.’
I sympathize with Eide’s position of trying to keep things calm and under control in a nascent government’s second attempt at a major election, but blatant voter fraud, leading many of the populace feeling the election was illegitimate, can hamper greatly the government’s ability to effectively lead.
It is no surprise that reports like Galbraith’s cause the Obama administration pause in deciding how deeply involved we should be in Afghanistan. It’s been widely known that Obama disapproves of Karzai and was widely shaken by the weakness of the August election and it is likely that these issues are causing the administration to delay making a decision on American strategy and resource deployment. The under reported fact that Al Qaeda as a group has been remarkably diminished in recent years also plays a part in the administration’s calculus, no doubt. However, a decision needs to be made on how the US is going to continue its mission in Afghanistan soon. The deaths of 8 American soldiers yesterday sadly exemplifies the stakes at play. Those soldiers were at a far flung base close to the Pakistan border, significant because it’s these types of bases that will become less common as the US concentrates on protecting civilian areas, when they were massively attacked. The Galbraith report brings to life a bit more how complicated this foreign policy decision is for the US, but decisions need to be decided sometime.
