Opinion: What I Saw at Afghanistan's Elections

(Sept. 22) -- We arrived at the polling center in the northern Afghan province of Samengan via a road that winded its way around simple mud-brick houses, over narrow bridges of indeterminate effectiveness and on a surface so deeply pockmarked and uneven it barely qualified as a road.

I was in Afghanistan with the nongovernmental organization Democracy International, as part of an 80-person international election observer team.

All across Afghanistan, ordinary citizens headed to the polls on Saturday to cast a ballot for representatives to the country's Wolesi Jirga, or parliament, and in this tiny, rural village -- untouched by modernity -- it seemed that almost the entire community had gathered at the school/polling center to take in the proceedings. On one side were the village's male population; on the other were the women clad head to toe in full-length blue burqas. Meanwhile, children stared in wonder at our four-vehicle convoy and Kalashnikov-toting South African private security guards.

Clad in body armor and identification denoting us as international election observers, we marched to the village polling station to begin our monitoring. The polling center manager greeted us -- as did, it seemed, many of the idling men of the community -- deeply curious as to what exactly we were doing in their village. Our translator Sayed explained to the manager that we were here to observe the election process. He seemed momentarily confused but quickly ushered us inside the male voting station (our female colleagues were taken to the women's polling station).

There we witnessed an orderly and efficient electoral process. Men in traditional Afghan garb came into the small school room, showed their voting registration cards, were asked to dip their index finger in indelible ink to prevent multiple voting and were handed a folded and stamped ballot featuring the names of dozens of prospective candidates. They stepped behind a cardboard partition to mark their choice and then they took the folded ballot and slipped it into a sealed plastic box. Meanwhile agents for the various candidates stood watch, as did a local Afghan election monitor clad in a blue baseball cap. Against the windows, children pressed their faces to get a glimpse at what was happening inside.

My fellow observer and I took detailed notes, and just as quickly as we had arrived we were back in our armor-plated SUVs off to the next polling center.

One could not help but be moved by the experience. Here in one of the poorest and least-developed countries in the world -- in the midst of a vicious insurgency -- millions of ordinary Afghans literally risked their lives to cast a vote.

But of course, as is so often the case in Afghanistan, things are never exactly as they seem. What we saw at the polls on Election Day was akin to flying over Afghanistan at 30,000 feet and declaring "we had seen Afghanistan." Beneath the surface, intimidation and fraud ran rampant.

We heard from numerous local journalists, candidates and NGO officials about the various methods by which the election was being subverted.

The first and most obvious example is intimidation not just from the Taliban, who had threatened to cut off the ink-stained fingers of voters, but also rival candidates and local powerbrokers. Journalists told us of candidate agents and even candidates themselves showing up the polls to "encourage" voters to support them. Others spoke of varying levels of manipulation from the provincial minister of public health, who pushed doctors and nurses to vote for his sister, who was a candidate, to efforts by President Hamid Karzai himself to ensure a more pliant legislative body.

There were also stories of millions of fake voter registration cards and even voters being paid to turn over their cards to they couldn't go to the polls. Small-scale irregularities can make a huge difference in race like this one. Since there are so many candidates on the ballot (and no political parties) the top vote earner in a province may only get 10 to 15 percent of the vote. Others will win with even fewer voters. It creates an odd dynamic whereby the majority of voters in Afghanistan will likely not cast a ballot for a winning candidate.

But perhaps the biggest challenge is the lack of even basic appreciation for the electoral process. As one Afghan journalist said to me, very few people were voting for the "right" reasons or even truly understand what democracy means. Most were voting along tribal and ethnic lines or perhaps for the local powerbroker or militia leader, for whom the legislative process is simply power politics conducted by other means. It's hard to imagine that many Afghans expect to benefit from the experience of voting or even fully comprehend its potential benefits.

None of this should be a huge surprise. This was only Afghanistan's second legislative election in its history, and since the first one five years ago the country's voters have very little to show for the exercise -- rising corruption, an incompetent and ineffective central government, and a deteriorating security situation that has left nearly the entire country at the mercy of the Taliban insurgency.

For all the inspiring images I saw of Afghans at the polls, at its core Afghanistan remains a deeply dysfunctional and dispirited country. There is a tendency in the United States to view elections as the lodestar of representative democracy. But elections in underdeveloped democracies can have the perverse effect of actually legitimizing a nation's dysfunctional political institutions. One cannot help but fear that this will be the case in Afghanistan.

To be sure, if a truly representative political system is going to take root in Afghanistan, even the imperfect experience of having voters go to the polls sets an important example. But as of yet, for all its trappings, democracy in Afghanistan remains as uneven and bumpy as that poorly maintained village road.