A Royal Afghan Mess

Two months ago, I was standing in the 100-plus degree heat of Jalalabad, Afghanistan, monitoring an election that gained infamy almost as soon as it began. As an observer for the International Republican Institute (IRI), I witnessed the effects fraud, intimidation, and voter apathy firsthand. And I saw why the runoff election that would have taken place later this month, had it not been cancelled today, would have been no better. Most importantly, I saw the barrage of lessons that Afghanistan and the international community will have to learn before parliamentary and district elections next year if there is any hope for better outcomes.

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By now, everyone knows the outcome of August's vote: a competently administered election marred by blatant fraud, followed by an adjudication process that threw out tainted ballots. The result saw front-runner and incumbent, President Hamid Karzai, sink to less than 50 percent of the vote, thereby triggering an upcoming runoff election -- one that everyone hoped would redeem, if only partially, the legitimacy of the election process in Afghan eyes. But yesterday, Karzai's opponent Abdullah Abdullah pulled out of the runoff, saying he couldn't participate in another flawed vote. Now, the second ballot is off altogether. Karzai is back for another term, period.

The elections in Afghanistan mattered, and getting them wrong has had a serious impact. For its policy in Afghanistan to be effective, the United States cannot be seen as condoning -- or worse, complicit in -- a government that is only interested in enriching its members, rather than providing services and improving economic, health, and educational prospects for its citizens. Many in Afghanistan blame the United States for having sat by and watched while the central government skimmed off international funds.

The runoff was an acknowledgment of how badly the United States and its allies need to consolidate Afghan public opinion in favor of a legitimate government and, by extension, NATO troops. Abdullah's withdrawal is a reality check. If the international community is to prevent the same fraud, intimidation, and apathy from marring upcoming parliamentary and local elections -- the kind that matter most, in the everyday sense to Afghans -- there is much work to be done.

A good start would be to look back at how badly things went in August. The IRI delegation of about 29 internationals and 40 Afghans was part of the roughly 300-strong international monitoring effort that covered the country's 28,000 polling stations (only 6,100 of which actually opened on election day). Out of about 31 million Afghans, about 16.5 million were registered to vote, and polling was set to run from 7 a.m to 4 p.m. Our job was to assess whether the elections appeared to be free and fair.

Jalalabad, my team's monitoring location, reportedly has a population of about 300,000, though there hasn't been a census in decades. As with the rest of Afghanistan, the city had no voter list. A senior election official told us after the vote that $100 million was spent to issue registration cards nationwide, but the data obtained was not converted into national or provincial registration lists.

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