Credibility and the Afghan Elections

Jean MacKenzie, writing from Kabul, gets real about the Afghan elections:

U.N. Special Representative Kai Eide has already sought to lower expectations, saying that the poll is “not perfect.” No one speaks any longer of “free and fair” elections — now international experts are content with “credible.”

For many Afghans, the whole idea was absurd from the beginning. With huge swaths of the country too volatile to establish secure polling stations; campaign teams bent on bribery and intimidation; and a host of candidates with no answers to the country’s seemingly insurmountable problems, the voters have very few expectations from the exercise.

I’m not there, of course, but this is how Jane Marriott — a British diplomat on loan to the interagency team headed by Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan — put it on Wednesday (PDF):

We want elections that are credible, secure, and inclusive.  And we want them to be seen as legitimate by the Afghans and the rest of the world.

As MacKenzie points out, “credible, secure and inclusive” is a standard short of “free and fair.” But what’s to be done? The Afghan constitution called for elections earlier this year and the Karzai government already pushed them back. Jeremy Shapiro at the Brookings Institution wonders “whether it is wise to hold the election.” (He doesn’t explicitly answer the question, but suggests the answer is no.) Well, for whom? This is the first election conducted not by the international community but by the Afghans themselves. Canceling it isn’t an option, even if the United States decided that such blatant interference was justified, and neither is wishing for more benign circumstances for it to occur under.