bellyscratch
19th August 2009, 10:55
This week’s presidential election in Afghanistan will be an elaborate piece of political theatre designed to show increasingly uneasy Western voters that progress is being made in the war-torn nation after nearly eight years of US-led occupation.
Most Afghans already believe they know who will win the vote: the candidate chosen by the United States and its NATO allies.
Voting will mostly be held in urban areas, under the guns of US and NATO troops. The countryside, ruled by the Taliban, who are often local farmers moonlighting as fighters, is too dangerous for this electoral charade. Over half of Afghanistan is under Taliban influence by day, 75% at night.
The entire election and vote-counting election commission are financed and run by the US. So are leading candidates. Ten thousand Afghan mercenaries hired by the US will police the polls and intimidate voters. US-financed Afghan media are busy promoting Washington’s candidates.
The Taliban vows to disrupt the sham election, which it calls a tool of foreign occupation. Other nationalist and tribal groups battling Western occupation are also excluded from the election. In fact, all parties are banned; only individuals are allowed to run. This is a favorite tactic of non-democratic regimes, particularly the US-backed dictatorships of the Arab world.
The fake election is quite literally being bought in advance, with candidates competing over the size of bribes paid to regional warlords to secure votes in the areas they control.
A BBC report this week showed how voting cards were being sold in Kabul. Its undercover reporter was offered 1000 cards on the spot at a cost of $10 (£6) each. All were authentic with the name, photo and home details of the voter.
Legalising rape to buy votes
President Karzai slipped through his law which effectively legalised rape and entitled husbands to starve their wives if they are refused sex, with the aim of gaining support from fundamentalist clerics who influence the country's shia, representing 20 percent of the population. When the law was first proposed a few months ago, it provoked outrage from Obama and Gordon Brown. Not a word from them now, when the legislation is used as an instrument to buy votes for US favoured candidates in this fake election. So much for the eight year war being a fight for women's human rights.
The leading candidates maintain a charade of being "rivals" to give the impression of a genuine electoral contest, but in reality a post-election stictch-up is being hatched behind doors which are closed to the Afghan electorate.
President Hamid Karzai’s main "rival," Abdullah Abdullah, fronts for the Russian and Iranian-backed Tajik Northern Alliance. Technocrat Ashraf Gani is another supposedly leading candidate. Both men are expected to get high positions in any new government formed by Karzai. Their primary role is to give the impression of an electoral contest.
The northern Tajiks and Uzbeks, traditional foes of the majority Pashtun, are in cahoots with Russia, Iran and India, all of whom have designs on Afghanistan. They continue to dominate Karzai’s faltering regime. The majority Pashtun are largely excluded from power.
In Washington’s stage-managed Afghan votes, real opposition is excluded. The US used the same trick in Iraq’s rigged elections. Ironically, the US and its NATO allies have been blasting Iran for lapses in its recent presidential election while stage-managing far more questionable elections in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The United Nations, which, in the words of a senior American diplomat, has become "a leading tool of US foreign policy," is being used to validate the US-run election. The feeble current UN chief, Ban-Ki moon, was put into his job by Washington.
Whoever wins Obama is the real power
Meanwhile, the party-line North American media keeps lauding the vote. It has long-term memory loss. In 1967, during the Vietnam war, the New York Times -- which is now a vocal supporter of the war in Afghanistan -- wrote of the US-supervised Vietnamese elections, "83% of voters cast ballots... in a remarkably successful election... the keystone of President Johnson’s policy of encouraging the growth of the constitutional process in Vietnam."
The vote may be close this week, since so many Afghans dislike Karzai, thus forcing a runoff. But whoever wins, President Barack Obama will end up the real power of Afghanistan.
Following his speech this week to US army veterans, in which he managed to top George Bush's rhetoric, claiming that Afghanistan was not a war of choice, but of necessity to keep the American people safe, Obama will be desperate to promote the election as a sign of "progress".
As the casualty figures for the invading armies rise incessantly, as security in the country contiues to collaps, so that even Karzai's palace and the US embassy in Kabul cannot be protected from suicide bombers, as corruption and the drug trade continue to dominate all corners of the Afghan economy, as conditions for women continue to deteriorate, Obama and Gordon Brown will try to sell the sham election as "flawed" but a step in the right direction.
Ravaged Afghanistan needs genuine, honest elections, and patient national reconciliation, free of foreign manipulation and intervention. That’s the only true road to peace. For that to be possible the first step must be the removal of all occupation armies.
http://stopwar.org.uk/content/view/1440/27/
Most Afghans already believe they know who will win the vote: the candidate chosen by the United States and its NATO allies.
Voting will mostly be held in urban areas, under the guns of US and NATO troops. The countryside, ruled by the Taliban, who are often local farmers moonlighting as fighters, is too dangerous for this electoral charade. Over half of Afghanistan is under Taliban influence by day, 75% at night.
The entire election and vote-counting election commission are financed and run by the US. So are leading candidates. Ten thousand Afghan mercenaries hired by the US will police the polls and intimidate voters. US-financed Afghan media are busy promoting Washington’s candidates.
The Taliban vows to disrupt the sham election, which it calls a tool of foreign occupation. Other nationalist and tribal groups battling Western occupation are also excluded from the election. In fact, all parties are banned; only individuals are allowed to run. This is a favorite tactic of non-democratic regimes, particularly the US-backed dictatorships of the Arab world.
The fake election is quite literally being bought in advance, with candidates competing over the size of bribes paid to regional warlords to secure votes in the areas they control.
A BBC report this week showed how voting cards were being sold in Kabul. Its undercover reporter was offered 1000 cards on the spot at a cost of $10 (£6) each. All were authentic with the name, photo and home details of the voter.
Legalising rape to buy votes
President Karzai slipped through his law which effectively legalised rape and entitled husbands to starve their wives if they are refused sex, with the aim of gaining support from fundamentalist clerics who influence the country's shia, representing 20 percent of the population. When the law was first proposed a few months ago, it provoked outrage from Obama and Gordon Brown. Not a word from them now, when the legislation is used as an instrument to buy votes for US favoured candidates in this fake election. So much for the eight year war being a fight for women's human rights.
The leading candidates maintain a charade of being "rivals" to give the impression of a genuine electoral contest, but in reality a post-election stictch-up is being hatched behind doors which are closed to the Afghan electorate.
President Hamid Karzai’s main "rival," Abdullah Abdullah, fronts for the Russian and Iranian-backed Tajik Northern Alliance. Technocrat Ashraf Gani is another supposedly leading candidate. Both men are expected to get high positions in any new government formed by Karzai. Their primary role is to give the impression of an electoral contest.
The northern Tajiks and Uzbeks, traditional foes of the majority Pashtun, are in cahoots with Russia, Iran and India, all of whom have designs on Afghanistan. They continue to dominate Karzai’s faltering regime. The majority Pashtun are largely excluded from power.
In Washington’s stage-managed Afghan votes, real opposition is excluded. The US used the same trick in Iraq’s rigged elections. Ironically, the US and its NATO allies have been blasting Iran for lapses in its recent presidential election while stage-managing far more questionable elections in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The United Nations, which, in the words of a senior American diplomat, has become "a leading tool of US foreign policy," is being used to validate the US-run election. The feeble current UN chief, Ban-Ki moon, was put into his job by Washington.
Whoever wins Obama is the real power
Meanwhile, the party-line North American media keeps lauding the vote. It has long-term memory loss. In 1967, during the Vietnam war, the New York Times -- which is now a vocal supporter of the war in Afghanistan -- wrote of the US-supervised Vietnamese elections, "83% of voters cast ballots... in a remarkably successful election... the keystone of President Johnson’s policy of encouraging the growth of the constitutional process in Vietnam."
The vote may be close this week, since so many Afghans dislike Karzai, thus forcing a runoff. But whoever wins, President Barack Obama will end up the real power of Afghanistan.
Following his speech this week to US army veterans, in which he managed to top George Bush's rhetoric, claiming that Afghanistan was not a war of choice, but of necessity to keep the American people safe, Obama will be desperate to promote the election as a sign of "progress".
As the casualty figures for the invading armies rise incessantly, as security in the country contiues to collaps, so that even Karzai's palace and the US embassy in Kabul cannot be protected from suicide bombers, as corruption and the drug trade continue to dominate all corners of the Afghan economy, as conditions for women continue to deteriorate, Obama and Gordon Brown will try to sell the sham election as "flawed" but a step in the right direction.
Ravaged Afghanistan needs genuine, honest elections, and patient national reconciliation, free of foreign manipulation and intervention. That’s the only true road to peace. For that to be possible the first step must be the removal of all occupation armies.
http://stopwar.org.uk/content/view/1440/27/