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Anti-Climax in Afghanistan
The massive election violence that the Taliban had threatened to unleash never materialized, but turnout may still have been low.
Adrees Latif
/
Reuters-Landov
Women stand in line to vote in Afghanistan's presidential election at a mosque in Kabul on August 20, 2009.
Aug 20, 2009
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Listening to Pashtana Wardak talk just after she cast her ballot in today's presidential election, you'd think she voted for anybody but incumbent President Hamid Karzai. "Karzai has a lot of faults, made a lot of mistakes, and hasn't lived up to his promises," she says, standing in the courtyard of a girls' school where she voted, in a western suburb of Kabul. "His cabinet is corrupt, most ministers are opportunists, not professionals, and violence has increased." It's a stinging indictment.
But then suddenly the mother of six—and wife of a police officer—quietly makes a confession: she voted for Karzai. "Karzai seems independent, not favoring any tribe or political party," Wardak says, wearing a purple headscarf and long brown robe covering a purple dress. "Let's pray he improves his performance or we will sink further into misery and war."
Wardak's view seems to echo general voter sentiment that two NEWSWEEK reporters heard while visiting several polling stations in Kabul and in the western foothills of nearby Paghman province today. Most voters we interviewed voted for Karzai not out of any enthusiasm for the man or his job performance over the past nearly eight years—he has been president since December 2001—but rather out of resignation that there's no one else whom they trust to keep the country from sliding further toward becoming a failed state.
The good news for voters across most the country is that an offensive the Taliban claimed it would unleash did not materialize. There was a two-hour shootout between two Taliban gunmen and security forces in eastern Kabul, but both insurgents were killed and the violence was contained. In the provinces, there was a suicide bombing or two, several gun battles, and some rocket attacks. (In Paktia province, insecurity prevented the opening of some 30 polling stations. In Taliban-infested Zabul province, one Western poll observer said things were "eerily quiet.") But overall there wasn't a truly significant disruption of the election. In Kabul, the streets were quiet because Election Day is a national holiday. Traffic was light, and children flew kites—a favorite pastime that was banned under the Taliban regime—high into the bright blue sky.
Even so, it remains to be seen how many Afghans turned out to vote. Many may simply have stayed home to be on the safe side after insurgents said they would place land mines and IEDs on the roads. The attitude in much of the hotly contested south and east, where the Taliban is strongest, may have been to err on the side of caution and not vote. In Kabul, at least in the several polling stations that NEWSWEEK visited, the turnout seemed respectable but certainly not as heavy as during the 2004 presidential vote, which saw nationwide voter participation of 70 percent. (By contrast, turnout in last year's U.S. presidential election, the highest in recent history, was 61 percent.) "There are fewer voters than we expected," says one Afghan security officer who declined to give his name and who is in charge of security at five polling stations. His foot was in a cast, the result of an IED blast eight days ago that wounded him and killed five Afghan policemen in an insurgent ambush near a mosque west of Kabul serving as a polling station today.
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