The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2010

Afghanistan: Going Public with Problems The August 2009 presidential elec- tions in Afghanistan dramatically raised some important issues for international monitoring, such as ensuring neutral monitoring and administration of the entire process — particularly in terms of security. After all, for an election to be cred- ible, all voters must be able to partici- pate under universal and equal suffrage. It is impossible to meet this standard if there is no way to assess whether a bad security situation kept voters away from the polls or, alterna- tively, whether they were intimidated. An independent commission ran the August 2009 presidential elections in Afghanistan. The United Nations appointed a special representative, Kai Eide, to monitor the campaign and the voting, and it also appointed outside members of the Elections Complaint Commission. But a highly public dispute between Eide and his deputy, Peter Galbraith, resulted in the firing of the latter for his insistence that the commission rec- ognize that the vote count for Presi- dent Hamid Karzai had been vastly inflated, with large numbers of his “votes” coming from nonexistent poll- ing stations. Eide maintained that even discussing the subject would inflame tension in the country and that, in any case, the U.N. had no mandate to “in- terfere” in the election. In Galbraith’s view, that position ig- nored the fact that the U.N. special representative’s mission was to support Afghanistan’s own political institutions in holding a free, fair and transparent election, according to international standards. So by refusing to acknowl- edge the extent of the fraud, the United Nations would lose all credibility. Eide looked narrowly at Afghan electoral law and its implementation, ignoring the fact that the government could not provide security in large areas of the country. In these districts, even if the polling station actually ex- isted and opened, the ability of voters to cast their vote freely was not some- thing that outside monitors could as- sess. Under heavy Western pressure, the Elections Complaints Commission car- ried out a recount that brought Karzai under the 50-percent mark — which, under the Afghan Constitution, neces- sitated a runoff. Despite the great lo- gistical difficulties in holding a rerun, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s position remained the same: the democratic process should pro- ceed. The withdrawal of Karzai’s oppo- nent, Abdullah Abdullah, and the can- cellation of the runoff changed neither Clinton’s position that sticking to the process would increase the legitimacy of the resulting government, nor the idea that clean elections are an inter- national value. Fixing a deal — at least publicly — that would have put Karzai in office before these procedures had run their course was no longer the conventional answer to the problem of stability, as it might well have been before the Iran- ian elections. Once Abdullah with- drew from the runoff, Washington could declare that Pres. Karzai had been legitimately installed. But the story has not yet run its course. Against Karzai’s wishes, the in- ternational community has succeeded in obtaining veto power for interna- tional members of the Electoral Com- mission that will oversee this fall’s provincial balloting. And that deter- mination may well reflect a post-Iran spotlight effect. The fraud in last year’s elections was an important element in the hardest of hard power decisions: setting a strategy to justify increasing U.S. troop deploy- ment to Afghanistan. The corruption of the Karzai government has been a continuing issue, as Washington looks for competent partners not only in the capital but at the provincial and local levels, bypassing Kabul. Overall U.S. strategy in Afghanistan explicitly connects the government’s ability to be a partner with its level of public support. That, in turn, is con- nected to its degree of accountability to its own people through honest elec- tions. Lebanon: Dealing with Hezbollah Security was a key issue in the elec- tions Lebanon held on June 7, 2009, just one week prior to the Iranian vote. The Lebanese process unfolded under a new electoral law that took giant steps toward meeting international standards. The legislation set up a commission to oversee new regulations of the media and campaign finance and a constitutional court to hear elec- tion-related complaints, among other reforms. In marked contrast to what hap- pened in Iran, no significant doubts have been cast on the accuracy of the country’s vote count, which saw a sur- prise victory by a pro-Western electoral bloc and the acceptance of that result by the Iranian-allied Hezbollah Party. This is true even though the elec- tions took place in the shadow of polit- ical events of enormous consequence. Syrian troops had begun withdrawing from Lebanon as a result of “Cedar Revolution” demonstrations in the wake of the 2005 assassination of 48 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 Security was a key issue in the elections Lebanon held on June 7, 2009, just one week prior to the Iranian vote.