Monkey Riding Dragon
1st November 2009, 22:18
U.S.-installed Afghan President Hamid Karzai's remaining equally crooked electoral opponent (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/pers-o26.shtml), Abdullah Abdullah, has now pulled out of the country's November 7th run-off election (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8336388.stm). Now it is virtually certain that Afghanistan will follow the Florida model of democracy with the national Supreme Court simply decreeing Karzai the victor while the United Stated literally dictates who will hold what offices in a subsequently-arranged "national unity government".
The Afghan people never had a real choice to begin with. None of the candidates on the original ballot, least of which Karzai and Abdullah, opposed the U.S. occupation of their country, as the majority of the Afghan population does. As with all votes held under conditions of foreign occupation, this was an election at gunpoint. The outcome was a foregone conclusion (the American occupation will continue) and most of the Afghan population knew it from the start. As contrasted with the 2004 voter turnout of 70 percent, the 2009 Afghan election saw only 30 percent of registered voters bother to cast a ballot at all. Fully one-third of Karzai's "votes" were fraudulent, as were a similar proportion of Abdullah's. Now there will either be no run-off at all or one in which the incumbent president will run unopposed.
And so the farce continues...
It is in defense of this sort of flowering democracy that we apparently must send tens of thousands more of our soldiers to kill and die.
The Afghan people never had a real choice to begin with. None of the candidates on the original ballot, least of which Karzai and Abdullah, opposed the U.S. occupation of their country, as the majority of the Afghan population does. As with all votes held under conditions of foreign occupation, this was an election at gunpoint. The outcome was a foregone conclusion (the American occupation will continue) and most of the Afghan population knew it from the start. As contrasted with the 2004 voter turnout of 70 percent, the 2009 Afghan election saw only 30 percent of registered voters bother to cast a ballot at all. Fully one-third of Karzai's "votes" were fraudulent, as were a similar proportion of Abdullah's. Now there will either be no run-off at all or one in which the incumbent president will run unopposed.
And so the farce continues...
It is in defense of this sort of flowering democracy that we apparently must send tens of thousands more of our soldiers to kill and die.