A corrupt election in Afghanistan

[laststeamtrain]

A corrupt election in Afghanistan
10 August 2009

It is widely acknowledged that the August 20 presidential election in Afghanistan will be characterised by vote-rigging and the bribing or intimidation of voters in the areas under US/NATO control. In the ethnic Pashtun southern provinces where the Taliban-led insurgency, which has called for a boycott, is most active, it is predicted that there will be mass abstention. The result will not be credible and the new government will lack any legitimacy.

<snip>

Karzai is supported by various ethnic-based powerbrokers who backed the US invasion and as a result returned to political prominence. Over the past seven years, under the protection of US and NATO occupation forces, they have once again transformed the north and west of the country into their personal fiefdoms.

Karzai’s campaign is supported by a veritable rogue’s gallery of the warlords and tyrants who plunged Afghanistan into years of brutal civil war from 1992 to 1996, before they were driven from power by a Taliban-led insurgency.

Karzai’s two vice-presidential running mates are Tajik strongman Mohammad Qasim Fahim and Hazari powerbroker Karim Khalili. Karzai has been endorsed by Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum. All three are accused of war crimes in the 1990s and effectively control the local governments, police, Afghan army units and electoral officials in their respective spheres of influence.

Karzai is also backed by anti-Taliban Pashtun warlord Abdul Rab Rassoul Sayyaf, a fanatical Islamist who was accused of “repeated human butchery” during the civil war. He has also been endorsed by Gul Agha Sherzai, a Pashtun powerbroker whose brutal rule over Kandahar from 1992 to 1994 was a significant factor in fostering support for the Taliban. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation accused him in June of being one of the country’s main drug barons.

<snip>

Statements last week by David Kilcullen, the counter-insurgency advisor to General David Petraeus in Iraq, who has now been appointed as an aide to Afghanistan commander General Stanley McChrystal, point in that direction. He compared Karzai with South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, whom the Kennedy administration had removed from power and murdered in 1963 in a US-backed military coup.

<more>

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/aug2009/pers-a10.shtml

[tekisui]

1. Our troops are dying for a rigged election, and they will be forced

to 'restore order' when there is an uprising against the outcome.