Afghanistan: Karzai strikes deal, stems political crisis

Editor's update: On Saturday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai struck a deal with lawmakers to allow the inauguration of parliament next week, stemming political turmoil.

KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghan President Hamid Karzai is in the middle of what could become the biggest political crisis of his already troubled reign.

In the wake of badly flawed parliamentary elections last fall, the attorney general’s office is intent on putting election officials behind bars, the Supreme Court wants to overturn the results, the losing candidates are organizing street protests, and even the winners are on the verge of open revolt due to a controversial decision to delay the opening session of the legislature.

Meanwhile the Afghan public is looking on with bemusement at the spectacle that is billed as “Western-style democracy.”

The new parliament was scheduled to open on Sunday; but the president’s office announced this week that inauguration would be put off until Feb. 22, to give a special tribunal looking into election fraud a chance to complete its work.

The executive branch was supposedly bowing to pressure from the judiciary: the Supreme Court, which recommended the institution of the tribunal, is trying to determine whether or not the fraud in September’s poll was blatant enough to warrant a general recount, or even an entirely new election.

Many hold that the special tribunal has no legal authority, since, according to the election law, the Independent Election Commission (IEC) and the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) are the final arbiters of election-related questions.

But according to Haroon Mir, a Kabul-based political analyst and also an unsuccessful candidate for parliament, the ECC may have helped to create the current standoff.

“According to the Afghan Constitution, the IEC and the ECC are the ultimate decision-makers,” said Mir. “But the ECC provided the attorney general’s office with a list of 450 people accused of fraud. So in a sense they invited the participation of the attorney general, and gave the office the right and the authority to investigate. Once they began that process, we needed a court to render a verdict.”

The decision to postpone the opening of the legislature caused outrage: those who were successful in their bid for a seat in parliament resent being told that they cannot begin their work. A group of some 200 who were gathered at the Intercontinental Hotel last week for orientation sessions said they would open parliament on their own, without Karzai if necessary.

“The court does not have the authority to order the MPs to start their work or not,” said Shukria Barakzai, a winning candidate from Kabul. “We need the president for the inauguration, to make a speech, but no other institution has authority under Afghan law.”

The elections and their troubled aftermath have tapped into a deep well of ethnic and political tensions in Afghanistan that could ultimately spill over into violence. There have already been protests and street blockages by outraged candidates who did not make the cut.

The ethnic component of the crisis is adding considerable fuel to the fire.

Pashtuns, who make up the country’s largest ethnic group, are feeling disenfranchised. If the new parliament is seated as presently constituted, Pashtuns will have only 94 seats in the 249-member body, 26 fewer than in the last legislature.

The main reason for the small showing of Pashtun representatives, say election observers, was the poor security in the predominantly Pashtun south and east, which kept many polls closed and many voters at home.

This was most glaringly obvious in Ghazni, a southeastern province with a large Pashtun population. All 11 seats from Ghazni went to the minority Hazara ethnic group, a fact that has many, including former Pashtun MP from Ghazni Daud Sultanzoi, furious. He warns that if the electoral mess is not cleared up, many of his constituents may be driven into the arms of the insurgency. The Taliban are drawn mainly from the Pashtun ethnic group.

“This was an election that went wrong,” he said. “Where fraud, misconduct, irregularities and violations of the law derailed elections that were supposed to stabilize this country. Instead, they have pushed Afghanistan to the brink of a new crisis. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people have been left without representation. If this is not corrected, the reaction will put the Taliban resistance to shame.”

Sultanzoi supports the special tribunal, apparently hoping that a new election may be in the offing. In the meantime, he insists, his old mandate still holds.

“According to the constitution, the previous legislature ends after the announcement of the final results of the election,” he said. “The final results are still in dispute, in court.”

But the executive branch does not agree. Once the IEC announced its results on Nov. 24, a decision endorsed by the international community, the former legislature was considered defunct. Some parliamentarians insisted on continuing their sessions while the dispute over results raged, so right around Christmas the central government called in security forces to lock them out of the parliament building.

This changes nothing, said Sultanzoi.

“Just because the doors are closed in an illegal fashion does not mean that the institution is not there, he said. “Legally, the previous body is still standing. We are not living in a legislative void right now.”

But that holds little sway with the executive branch, which is working in virtual isolation at the moment. The legislature is paralyzed, and the judiciary has always been more or less subject to the whims of the president.

This, say analysts gives rise to the uncomfortable notion that democracy itself is in danger in Afghanistan.

“In a democratic system there should be three independent but coordinated branches of government,” said Wahid Mojda, a political analyst based in Kabul. “But in Afghanistan, the judiciary has been dominated by the executive branch. When two or more branches merge, then a dictatorship emerges. If the executive branch gives itself the right to interfere with or dominate other branches of government, this is not democracy at all.”

Elections in Afghanistan have never been a simple proposition. The system adopted for the legislative ballot, the Single Non-Transferable Vote (SNTV) almost guarantees that money and power, rather than ideas and platforms, will dominate the process.

According to SNTV, each candidate runs as an independent, rather than as a representative of a party. In Kabul, where more than 650 candidates competed for 33 seats, bewildered voters had little basis on which to make a decision; the day was won by those with the most money to spend on advertising, free gifts, and, according to the attorney general’s office, purchasing votes.

In the event that all of that did not work, there was always intimidation, vote rigging and bribing those who supervised the count.

The attorney general’s office has been determined to expose irregularities in the vote, and has arrested several members of Afghanistan’s electoral bodies, although no official charges have yet been issued.

But many see the fervor with which the government is looking into fraud in the parliamentary elections as more than a bit self-serving. If there is such sensitivity to electoral irregularities, they say, then why were the tainted 2009 presidential elections allowed to stand?

“If there is a special court to adjudicate electoral fraud, then the first person they summon should be President Karzai, for perpetrating fraud in last year’s presidential elections,” said Ahmad Behzad, a successful parliamentary candidate from Heraat province. “Why did the judiciary not react then? More than 1.5 million votes in the presidential elections were found to be fraudulent.”

The court’s mission is not to sort out the alleged fraud, insists Behzad, but to overturn elections that turned out to be unpalatable to the executive branch. Karzai will have a harder time with the new body, which is dominated by people critical of his government. He will also have to placate his political base, the Pashtuns, who are disgruntled at their lack of representation.

“This court was convened for political purposes,” said Behzad.

At the very least, the current crisis will complicate the task of the United States and the rest of the international community, who are hoping to stabilize the country enough to be able to hand over primary responsibility for security and governance to the Afghans by 2014.

However the crisis is ultimately resolved, the process has been a destructive one, says Haroon Mir.

“Instead of strengthening the institutions of government, these elections have weakened them,” he said. “If the next presidential elections are not handled properly, then I think democracy will die in Afghanistan. We are losing valuable time. The deadline for us is 2014, and if we do not focus on important issues, we will not be in a position to take responsibility by that time. This is a tragedy, and the ultimate losers will be the Afghan people.”

Kabul-based journalists Abaceen Nasimi and Asar Hakimi contributed to this report.