The withdrawal of candidacy by Dr Abdullah Abdullah from the second round of elections which was scheduled to take place in Nov has come as a rude shock to many, particularly for millions of Afghans who voted for him in the first round earlier this year. As I write this piece Hamid Karzai has indeed been declared the winner. This decision by Dr Abdullah which paved the way for Karzai was taken after the failure of US and UN backed power sharing deal between the two candidates. It is said that Karzai rejected the most important demand of removing the chief of Independent Electoral Commission, among other things. Daoud Ali Najafi is the same person who has been accused by Dr Abdullah of having perpetrated the massive fraud in the first round of elections in favor of Hamid Karzai.

There are two facets of this issue. The first is that you cannot really expect Karzai to sack the very man who nearly gave the president’s chair to him as a gift. The second issue is that once the US and UN had acknowledged the massive fraud which took place earlier they should have endorsed this demand of Dr Abdullah. Had they both done so things might have been different. In my view I see this as a sign of failure of US to ensure that democratic process reaches it’s logical conclusion. Pertinent to mention that it was indeed the US which forced Hamid Karzai to accept second round of elections. Having done so they should have gone the whole hog but did not for reasons best known to them.

If you actually take an unbiased view of things Dr Abdullah was indeed justified in is demand for removal of Najafi. If the commission was guilty of being an accomplice in the election fraud it is quite natural for Dr Abdullah to expect something similar in the second round. In fact a UN official called Peter Galbraith who was ironically sacked for alleging large scale fraud by Karzai in the first phase has said so much. He says that there’s no doubt about Karzai plotting large scale fraud again. It stands to logic as well. I mean if he did it earlier with the connivance of Najafi what stops him from doing it again? Thankfully, Dr Abdullah has only withdrawn from this race, not boycotted it. This means that though he may not become the President any time soon he will continue to be relevant to Afghan politics in days to come. It also means that Karazi and him are not actually in a state of war with each other.

It was actually quite ironic to see Hillary Clinton playing down this whole thing when she said “It is now a matter for the Afghan authorities to decide on a way ahead that brings this electoral process to a conclusion in line with the Afghan constitution,” undermining the very reason why Abdullah withdrew from this race. It is indeed quite intriguing to see Americans fault at the very first test in Afghanistan. We all know that they have indeed been having a tough time militarily but politically this was their first test and in my opinion they failed. What they did was just to ensure that the next govt looked somewhat democratic in this entire electoral process. Whether the whole thing was just or not did not really matter. How the hell would Afghans make out the difference? And they won’t. Not after this.

But in my opinion US failed and failed miserably. This is not the way elections are held in any democratic country. This is not the way you can bring about a change in Afghanistan. If Americans want to stabilize Afghanistan in the long run they will have to do better than this. It is also not the way the world’s only super power is supposed to behave.

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Posted on November 2nd, 2009 Track the world • Tags: Abdullah, Clinton, elections, Karzai, UN, US. • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback