Behind the elections in Afghanistan

Peter W. Galbraith served as deputy special representative of the United Nations in Afghanistan from June until last week, when he was fired over differences with his boss over how to handle allegations of fraud in the country’s election in August. Galbraith wanted the claims of fraud addressed. Apparently he took seriously the UN’s mandate to support free, fair and transparent elections—and lost his job because of it.

In the Washington Post today, Galbraith writes about what he saw behind the scenes in the Afghanistan elections (emphasis ours):

Afghanistan’s presidential election, held August 20, should have been a milestone in the country’s transition from 30 years of war to stability and democracy. Instead, it was just the opposite. As many as 30 percent of Karzai’s votes were fraudulent, and lesser fraud was committed on behalf of other candidates. In several provinces, including Kandahar, four to 10 times as many votes were recorded as voters actually cast. The fraud 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. Unlike the United Nations-run elections in 2004, this balloting was managed by Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission (iec). Despite its name, the commission is subservient to Karzai, who appointed its seven members. Even so, the international role was extensive. The United States and other Western nations paid the more than $300 million to hold the vote, and UN technical staff took the lead in organizing much of the process, including printing ballot papers, distributing election materials and designing safeguards against fraud.Part of my job was to supervise all this UN support. In July, I learned that at least 1,500 polling centers (out of 7,000) were to be located in places so insecure that no one from the iec, the Afghan National Army or the Afghan National Police had ever visited them. Clearly, these polling centers would not open on Election Day. At a minimum, their existence on the books would create large-scale confusion, but I was more concerned about the risk of fraud.Local commission staff members were hardly experienced election professionals; in many instances they were simply agents of the local power brokers, usually aligned with Karzai. If no independent observers or candidate representatives, let alone voters, could even visit the listed location of a polling center, these iec staffers could easily stuff ballot boxes without ever taking them to the assigned location. Or they could simply report results without any votes being in the ballot boxes.Along with ambassadors from the United States and key allies, I met with the Afghan ministers of defense and the interior as well as the commission’s chief election officer. We urged them either to produce a credible plan to secure these polling centers (which the head of the Afghan Army had told me was impossible) or to close them down. Not surprisingly, the ministers—who served a president benefiting from the fraud—complained that I had even raised the matter. [My boss] ordered me not to discuss the ghost polling centers any further. On Election Day, these sites produced hundreds of thousands of phony Karzai votes.At other critical stages in the election process, I was similarly ordered not to pursue the issue of fraud. The UN mission set up a 24-hour election center during the voting and in the early stages of the counting. My staff collected evidence on hundreds of cases of fraud around the country and, more important, gathered information on turnout in key southern provinces where few voters showed up but large numbers of votes were being reported. [My boss] ordered us not to share this data with anyone, including the Electoral Complaints Commission, a UN-backed Afghan institution legally mandated to investigate fraud. Naturally, my colleagues wondered why they had taken the risks to collect this evidence if it was not to be used.In early September, I got word that the iec was about to abandon its published anti-fraud policies, allowing it to include enough fraudulent votes in the final tally to put Karzai over the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff. After I called the chief electoral officer to urge him to stick with the original guidelines, Karzai issued a formal protest accusing me of foreign interference. My boss sided with Karzai. …Since my disagreements … went public, [my boss] and his supporters have argued that the United Nations had no mandate to interfere in the Afghan electoral process. This is not technically correct. The UN Security Council directed the UN mission to support Afghanistan’s electoral institutions in holding a “free, fair and transparent” vote, not a fraudulent one.

Galbraith’s account exposes the fraud within the United Nations as much as in the Afghan election. Besides reinforcing the futility of trying to impose democracy in a nation such as Afghanistan, with its history of ethno-regional warlordism, the Afghanistan election debacle once again demonstrated the ineptness and corruption of the UN.