Why can’t Afghanistan be more like Sweden? It is insufferable that this miserable statelet can reject liberal democracy despite the efforts of 70,000 NATO and NGO staff kicking their heels in Kabul’s dust for eight years. We have blown US$230 billion in US and UK taxpayers’ money and left 1,463 soldiers dead. Everything has been tried, from gender awareness courses to carpet-bombing Tora Bora. Thousands of Afghans have been massacred. Yet still the wretches won’t co-operate. They even fiddle elections.
That sums up the West’s response to the election staged in August by Afghan President Hamid Karzai. His decision on Tuesday to run a second round in two weeks has been greeted in Washington and London with an outburst of relieved congratulation. He may have had no option, but he had been raining on NATO’s parade.
The abuse and now expectation heaped on this presidential election are absurd. It is as if Kandahar were a precinct of Boston or a ward of south London. In a country awash with guns, drug lords, suicide bombers, aid theft and massive corruption, that a few ballot boxes might have been stuffed and returning officers suborned hardly qualifies as indictable crime. The fact that Karzai has been able to win any sort of legitimacy is amazing, with the Taliban controlling half the provincial districts and NATO incompetence reducing turnout in the south to somewhere near 5 percent.
NATO and the UN were warned well in advance that the election would be rigged, yet their synthetic fury and that of the Western media led to the sacking of a capable UN official. The rigging has frozen a decision on reinforcements by Washington’s National Security Council, plunging troops at the front into greater danger. And why? The US would have better deployed its dominance in Kabul by demanding a coalition government rather than another costly election.
Power in a dysfunctional state seldom lies with any representative of the majority. Ever since Washington flew Karzai back to Kabul in 2002, he has received billions of dollars in aid money, which he has shrewdly used to barter deals with tribal chiefs and provincial commanders.
Afghanistan has never enjoyed unified central government, but what it has emanates from Karzai’s status as agent for the occupying power. If the US is content for him to squander money on clinging to power, bribing Taliban and fueling a narco-economy, why is it so fastidious about election rigging?
The answer, of course, lies not in Afghanistan but in Washington and London. This war, like all hopeless wars, is hemorrhaging popularity. From the moment US President Barack Obama adopted Afghanistan as “his war” and allowed himself to be led by David Petraeus — that most dangerous of generals, a clever strategist — he was engulfed by the siren call of glory. He is now truly trapped.
Since glory resolutely refuses to show her face, US voters must be given a proxy. It is that they are rescuing the Afghans from their worse selves by “being given democracy,” much as Victorian Britons gave them God and the Queen. It was compensation for Kipling’s white man’s burden, and its “old reward”:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard.
If Osama bin Laden cannot be found, if the Taliban cannot be eliminated, if troops cannot be withdrawn, if victory cannot be declared, then Western leaders must find a reason for soldiers to die. Like Crusaders of old, they are told to die for the sacrament of a holy grail, in this case the franchise. Therefore it must not be desecrated by dodgy registers, fabricated returns and bought voters’ lists.
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