In the back offices of the multiple-pizza-box structure where Canada’s Foreign Affairs is housed, the conversations must be getting pretty frenzied right about now.
The news on the Afghan election, backed so earnestly by Canada and its $35 million contribution, has gone from terrible to tragic.
The huge cloud hanging over the whole enterprise means it almost doesn’t matter at this point if the UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission declares there are enough non-fraudulent votes to name Hamid Karzai president or orders a runoff. The damage has been done.
“International observers said, ‘This may not be a totally fair exercise, but it is a free election,’” says Fen Hampson, director of the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University. ”But increasingly it looks neither free nor fair.”
Some think, given the legitimacy deficit, the only option is to remount the entire election. “There’s only one way to repair the damage this mishandled election has caused,” says international law expert Michael Byers. “It’s time to declare the entire election null and void and begin the process again.”
Fraud, he says, has tarnished the credibility of the Afghan government, the UN and “of course any foreign countries that have personnel in Afghanistan participating or supporting the process. We are contributing to a spiral of illegitimacy.”
The voting saga continued on Monday when an Afghan rep on the ECC resigned, charging international interference, and two weeks ago the deputy head of the UN mission in Afghanistan, American Peter Galbraith, was fired for complaining that the “entire election was a foreseeable train wreck” and that the ECC had hidden the extent of the corruption.
The ECC has admitted there was “widespread” fraud in the election and has been investigating polling stations where a 100 per cent turnout was reported or where more than 95 per cent of votes were for a single candidate.
While the ECC initially announced it would probe all suspect voting stations, it is now, under the pressure of time, only investigating a sample 10 per cent of these, most of them in Karzai’s southern strongholds.
The ECC will either announce that Karzai has garnered over half the votes (the reputedly pro-Karzai Independent Election Commission has him currently at 54.6 per cent compared to contender Abdullah Abdullah’s 27.8 per cent) or order a runoff between the two candidates.
In a country already torn by civil war, ethnic tensions and tribal rivalries, doubts about the election process can be lethal. Hence, there’s a reason, says Mark Sedra, a U of Waterloo Afghanistan expert, why the UN/ECC went for a sampling probe instead of examining all suspect ballots.
“The question is whether they wanted to delegitimize the entire election by calling for a recount of the majority of the votes or to send a message that this was a more limited fraud,” says Sedra. “This is the message the UN wants to send. They didn’t want to say the entire election was a farce, because that would promote a political crisis in Kabul.”
And, certainly, a credibility shortfall poses a difficult dilemma for NATO forces. According to Hampson, the new U.S. administration “wants to train more Afghanis to look after the security situation and focus on economic development and reconstruction. The problem is, all of that is premised on having a workable government.”
Workable, of course, means the majority of voters, at least, acknowledge it as rightful. Would a government led by Karzai ever be seen as legitimate after this election? It’s incredible how much has changed since the former president was given a hero’s welcome in the House of Commons three years ago.
“I don’t think you’ll see Karzai coming to address Parliament any time soon,” says NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar. “The Tories’ guy has become associated with corruption; they don’t want to talk about him.”
In fact, Ottawa’s relationship with Karzai goes back to a three-year (2005 to 08) strategic advisory team in Afghanistan that then head of Canada’s military, Rick Hillier, embedded inside the fledgling Kabul government in order to strengthen its capacity to govern.
According to Dewar, the feds have avoided the only successful route to stability for the war-torn country: the brokering of a peace deal.
Dewar and the NDP favour a Canada-led eminent-persons’ panel to negotiate a ceasefire in the entire Central Asian region. “I prefer a diplomatic solution,” he says.
There was such an initiative a few months back, but, alas, the Tories nixed it. Hampson was behind the attempt, motivated, he says, by the “meagre” peace discussions going on even after Barack Obama’s administration launched the dual track of an armed buildup and new diplomatic activity.
Canada, he says, was in an ideal position to ratchet up the dialogue with the Kabul government, insurgent groups and countries including Pakistan, Russia and China. But on the feds’ end, Hampson says, there “wasn’t much appetite for that.”
At Foreign Affairs, spokesperson Laura Markle says her department welcomed the academics’ contribution but “there are no plans to create an eminent persons panel on Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
Mokhtar Lamani, a veteran diplomat and currently a visiting fellow at Waterloo’s Centre for International Governance, was one of three senior people chosen for that ill-fated diplomatic peace mission.
The Moroccan-born Canadian says statements by U.S. and NATO leaders that only certain insurgent groups would be acceptable in negotiations have not helped matters.
“I totally disagree with this idea of the good Taliban or the bad Taliban. You join some effort in peace or development or you are against it,” says Lamani, who worked on behalf of the Arab League as a peace broker among various factions in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.
“I don’t think the result of the election will have a big impact on the diplomatic solution, since all the candidates are from the corrupted Afghani establishment,” Lamani laments.