Stakes high as Afghanistan goes to polls
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Contributing editor
Emily Hohler Aug 21, 2009
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Hamid Karzai: can't survive without Western help
The outcome of this week's election in Afghanistan is "crucial", writes the foreign secretary, David Miliband, in The Daily Telegraph. We are in Afghanistan to suppress an international terrorist threat, he says. And having driven al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan we must not let it return under the "safe umbrella of Taliban rule". The next Afghan government has a duty to show its "determination to root out corruption" and "dedication to build a state that properly protects its people".
Given the conflicting messages from Whitehall, and the rising death toll of British troops – which reached 204 this week – it is good that Miliband has reminded the public why we are in Afghanistan and why the election matters, says The Daily Telegraph. But his stated aim of a "clean and competent" government is likely to prove elusive. As is the defence secretary, Bob Ainsworth's "confidently predicted victory". His declaration that our troops can "sort Afghanistan out within the next year or so" is wildly optimistic, agrees the Daily Mail. The outgoing chief of general staff, Sir Richard Dannatt, has said that Britain's involvement could last 40 years.
The "depressing truth" is that neither of the presidential front-runners, Hamid Karzai and his rival Abdullah Abdullah, can "do without American and British military support to stay in power and run the country", says Jon Swain in The Sunday Times. That doesn't lessen the significance of the election, which is being projected as a "milestone on the road to democracy". Nor is it surprising that Western nations are "desperate to justify their tremendous expenditure of blood and treasure".
What are the implications of the elections for the Taliban? The militants have vowed to disrupt them – there have been two suicide bombings in the past week. But this falls short of what they're capable of, says Jason Burke in The Observer. The reason they are not being more disruptive is partly because the Taliban don't want to alienate Afghans, most of whom want to vote, and partly because the probable re-election of Karzai will lead to the "induction into government of many of the very warlords whose venality and violence led to the rise of the Taliban in the first place".
The elections are not, as they are to the West, a "potential turning point nor a litmus test of the success of the Afghanistan project". The Taliban's strategy is two-fold: to "establish a parallel administration in enough of Afghanistan for the central administration to be [...] weakened and to progressively destroy all support for the presence of Western troops in Afghanistan in the US and Europe".
They may be well on the way to achieving that aim, says Jon Boone in The Observer. Some observers fear that Kandahar, Afghanistan's second-largest city, will soon become a "Taliban bastion" again. It was from this southern city that the Taliban began their march to power in the mid-1990s, and experts say that the city has been "comprehensively infiltrated" by insurgents. The elections, however, pose another more immediate threat: namely that a combination of "Taliban threats, bought votes and ballot-box stuffing" will lead thousands of angry Afghans onto the streets "complaining of a stolen election". In short, the stakes couldn't be higher.
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