As in Vietnam, Karzai is going to rule over an equally tiny island of corruption

Wednesday, 4 November 2009

Could there be a more accurate description of the Obama-Brown message of congratulations to the fraudulently elected Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan? First the Palestinians held fair elections in 2006, voted for Hamas and were brutally punished for it – they still are – and then the Iranians held fraudulent elections in June which put back the weird Mahmoud Ahmadinejad whom everyone outside Iran (and a lot inside) regard as a dictator. But now we have the venal, corrupt, sectarian Karzai in power after a poll far more ambitiously rigged than the Iranian version, and – yup, we love him dearly and accept his totally fraudulent election.

And now we are still trying to persuade his opponent to join a national unity government, an administration led by the man whose vote-stuffing was the very reason that same leader of the opposition – the good pseudo-Pashtun Abdullah Abdullah – refused to run in a second round of elections. And Karzai got his fawning congrats from the Obama-Brown twins. So that's OK then. Wagons Ho. For Westmoreland, read McChrystal. Send in the brave 40,000 to join the rest of the US cavalry as it fights its way west – or rather south-west – to the Khe Sanh of Afghanistan in Year Eight of the War on Terror.

The March of Folly was Barbara Tuchman's title for her book on governments – from Troy to Vietnam-era America – that followed policies contrary to their own interests. And well may we remember the Vietnam bit. As Patrick Bury, a veteran British soldier of our current Afghan adventure, pointed out yesterday, Vietnam is all too relevant.

Back in 1967, the Americans oversaw a "democratic" election in Vietnam which gave the presidency to the corrupt ex-General Nguyen Van Thieuman. In a fraudulent election which the Americans declared to be "generally fair" – he got 38 per cent of the vote – Thieu's opponents wouldn't run against him because the election was a farce.

In 1967, Washington needed the elections to give legitimacy to this revolting dictator – and thus provide credibility to its own military occupation of Vietnam in the war against Communism. As in Vietnam – where Saigon was a lonely kingdom of brutal power totally isolated from the rest of the country – Karzai is going to rule over an equally tiny island of corruption, protected by US mercenaries while the Americans perform their familiar role of propping up a dictator.

As ex-Lieutenant Bury sagely points out, the Afghan war is "campaigning on a par with the 19th-century British colonial army trying to manage the unwinnable... What was or is the strategy behind these long, bloody conflicts?" Well, in 1967, it was the possible communisation of Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. Now it is Pashtunistan, Baluchistan, Waziristan. For us, the vast ignorant "plebes", it's supposed to stop the Taliban/al-Qa'ida beasts from attacking our looming towers all over again, albeit that the 2001 murderers in question largely hailed from that friendly, moderate, brutal, oligarchical monarchical dictatorship called Saudi Arabia where – thank the good gods – they don't hold elections.

But it's part of a dreary pattern. US forces were participating in a civil war in Vietnam while claiming they were supporting democracy and the sovereignty of the country. In Lebanon in 1982, they claimed to be supporting the "democratically" elected President Amin Gemayel and took the Christian Maronite side in the civil war. And now, after Disneyworld elections, they are on the Karzai-government side against the Pashtun villagers of southern Afghanistan among whom the Taliban live. Where is the next My Lai? Journalists should avoid predictions. In this case I will not. Our Western mission in Afghanistan is going to end in utter disaster.

Peter Galbraith was sacked after disagreements with his boss Kai Eide. Photograph: Toby Talbot/Associated Press

A former senior United Nations diplomat in Kabul has launched a scathing attack on the UN's handling of Afghanistan's disputed elections, claiming that almost one in three of the votes cast for president Hamid Karzai were fraudulent.

Writing in today's Washington Post, Peter Galbraith, the former deputy head of the UN mission in Afghanistan, singled out his former boss Kai Eide for criticism, saying that he had deliberately downplayed the level of cheating in an election where in one region "10 times as many votes were recorded as voters actually cast".

Galbraith, who was sacked last week after his disagreements with Eide about how to deal with electoral fraud became public, said the extraordinary level of fraud in the August vote "has handed the Taliban its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United States and its Afghan partners".

The election was a "foreseeable train wreck", he said, with Eide – the Norwegian diplomat in charge of the UN mission – standing idle as Afghan election authorities and ministers loyal to the president avoided taking steps that could have reduced massive fraud.

The extraordinary intervention could torpedo what many diplomats in Kabul suspect is an attempt by Eide and the US to minimise further controversy over fraud allegations and move quickly to declare Karzai the re-elected president of Afghanistan.

Opposition politicians, including Abdullah Abdullah, the second-placed candidate, who wants to see a run-off vote, have seized on remarks made by Galbraith since he was sacked by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, last Wednesday.

Yesterday Abdullah accused Eide of "giving a green card for fraud to determine the outcome of the election".

A war of words between Galbraith and the UN – which has attempted to characterise the row as a "personality dispute" – has been gradually escalating since he was sacked last week.

In a letter to Ban, which was leaked to the New York Times, Galbraith made a number of devastating allegations against Eide, including the claim that the Norwegian diplomat ordered him not to hand over to election officials information that showed turnout had been tiny in the south, where the Taliban intimidation campaign against voters was most effective.

He also said Eide told him to stop lobbying for the elimination of "ghost polling stations" – voting centres in areas of the country that were too dangerous to actually open, but which nonetheless received ballot papers that could be filled out by corrupt officials.

Galbraith also claimed Eide prevented him from trying to stop the Independent Election Commission from abandoning its own safeguards, which would have excluded fraudulent ballots from the count, probably reducing Karzai's score to below 50%, forcing a second-round vote.

Eide told him to back off, Galbraith said, after Karzai ordered his foreign minister to protest that the American was interfering in Afghan affairs. He said the Afghan government threatened him with expulsion.

His article in the Washington Post went even further with its claim that a third of Karzai's votes were fraudulent. If true, that would mean the president received well under the 50% of all votes required for him to win on the first round.

Preliminary results give Karzai 55% and Abdullah 28%.

The Election Complaints Commission has ordered an audit of 10% of the 3,063 votes that have been deemed to be suspicious because of a very high turnout or where nearly all the votes went to a single candidate.

Galbraith also warned of the huge political dangers if the outcome of the vote is not accepted by the Tajiks, Afghanistan's second-largest ethnic group, who are predominant in the north and seen as Abdullah's main constituency.

"If the Tajiks believe that fraud denied their candidate the chance to compete in a second round, they may respond by simply not recognising the authority of the central government," he said.

He also said the high level of fraud "virtually guarantees that a government emerging from the tainted vote will not be credible with many Afghans", destroying President Barack Obama's hopes of having a legitimate partner in the country to help implement his strategy.