Word: karzai
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...early returns from Afghanistan's presidential election had the smell of a decorous massage job. With 10% of districts reporting, the incumbent, Hamid Karzai, and his main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, the former Foreign Minister, were tied, with about 40% each. But few of those votes came from Karzai's Pashtun strongholds in the south, where turnout was light - owing to Taliban threats - but heavily managed. "It's not exactly one man, one vote out in the rural areas," a Western diplomat told me. "The tribal leader gathers everyone together and says, 'We're voting for Candidate X.'" In some cases...
...that barely governs and a guerrilla insurgency that has threatened to kill anyone caught voting is illustrative of our current Afghan dilemma. We have been prodding the Afghans to run, from Kabul, a country that has always been governed from the bottom up, valley by valley, tribe by tribe. Karzai has many attributes, but a desire to provide effective governance is off his radar screen. He is good at the traditional form of Afghan politics, creating alliances among tribal and ethnic factions. The money distributed by the central government - inevitably, money contributed by the international community - is routinely received...
...Karzai camp has issued similar charges, even as the President's campaign manager dismisses the charges by rivals: "If you are in second place, you say anything." However, Abdullah's claims received a shot in the arm on Aug. 25 from six other presidential hopefuls, including former Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani, who alleged that widespread fraud took place on election day, largely to the President's advantage. At least 1,461 complaints have already been lodged with the Electoral Complaints Commission, more than 150 of which involve large numbers of votes and could affect the final outcome. The commission...
...officials, meanwhile, say they are working to avoid the prospect of post-election unrest. Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, has met with Abdullah and Karzai to insist they refrain from claiming victory until results are complete. Yet the longer the process drags on and the barbs fly, analysts say, the greater the space for troublemaking. "It is dangerous for each side to keep supporters [charged up] for the future," says Nasrullah Stanikzai, a politics professor at Kabul University. (Read how a contested election result in Afghanistan may help...
...patience is wearing thin amid the name-calling. It would be stretched to the limit with a run-off. "This government can do nothing right. Even by cheating, these politicians cannot win," says shopkeeper Siddiq Sadeg. He would not disclose for whom he voted, only saying it was neither Karzai nor Abdullah. And that candidate would remain his choice - if he'd bother to go to the polls again...