Ink Stain

The days leading up to Afghanistan's October 9 presidential elections had an eerie feel to them. Foreigners working for the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations withdrew to their homes. U.N. agencies issued body armor to their employees and ordered them not to venture outside. All conversations in Kabul centered on whether something dire would happen during the elections. Nobody knew what to expect. By October 8, most streets in Kabul were deserted. Mullah Omar, the former leader of the Taliban, issued a statement from hiding warning Afghans that, if they turned up to vote the following day, they would be attacked.

On the morning of election day, Kabul was a ghost town. Blurry silhouettes of soldiers shimmered in the dust, blocking intersections and conducting searches, their guns held firmly across their chests, fingers on the triggers. Riding to the southern city of Gardez, 90 miles south of Kabul, the only vehicles I saw on the normally busy thoroughfare were carrying women on their way to vote. Small groups of men, bundled in blankets, marched alongside the road to the nearest voting locations.

I had first visited Gardez in mid-September, and trouble was already brewing then. Capital of the majority Pashtun province of Paktia, Gardez was an area where support for the Taliban still appeared to be strong. On September 16, I watched as thousands of local men carrying traditional swords and shields danced in circles in preparation for a visit by President Hamid Karzai, who was expected to land at the nearby Abdul Hai Gardezi High School. Suddenly, there was a telltale whistle in the air, followed by a muffled explosion. The locals seemed unconcerned, but Karzai's American security detail did not greet the missile with the same nonchalance, and it promptly canceled the visit, to the disappointment of the expectant throngs.

The Afghanistan experts agreed that trouble was coming. In the weeks before the poll, New York University's Barnett Rubin, a Central Asia specialist, told me that it could be a disaster. "Afghanistan has no roads, no electronic communication except for the military commanders. The one technology in abundance is weapons," Rubin said. "There will be no international observers flooding the country because of security issues." Indeed, most international observers did not expect the elections to adhere to high standards of fairness. As one U.N. security official warned, "[The elections] will be bought--communities will vote according to their chieftain." The various intelligence and security organizations operating in Kabul thought that there could be chaos, saying that hundreds of Taliban and Al Qaeda supporters were entering through Pakistan to disrupt the polls. And indeed, between May 1 and August 20, 33 people working on Afghan voter registration were injured in attacks. Twelve were killed.

On election day, Gardez seemed just as ominous. The city's four paved roads were empty, with only flatbed trucks carrying Afghan soldiers, tasked to protect the vote, pointing their Kalashnikovs menacingly in every direction. A steady stream of thousands of turbaned men entered the high school, the city's voting center. Inside, soldiers confiscated machine guns, patting men down, searching under their turbans and even their beards. Men wearing blue U.N. shirts guided voters into tents, where a hole was punched in their voter registration cards, ostensibly indelible ink was placed on their thumb, and they were then shown the ballot, a massive, two-foot-long piece of paper with pictures of the candidates and party symbols.

Yet, despite fears that the election would be marred, the vote generally went off without a hitch. Lines of women in blue burqas marched into Gardez, walking from miles away, unescorted by men, perhaps interacting with strange women for the first time since they were little girls. One woman named Sima, her face uncovered, held her baby on her chest and explained that she had walked for an hour to get to the polling booth. Jawara, another woman with her entire face and body covered by a black shawl with white stars, had walked from far away to vote for Hamid Karzai. "We are thirsty for peace," she said.

White Toyota Land Cruisers drove up. The governor of the area, Asadullah Wafa, had come to pay a visit. "God created men free, and now they can freely choose their president," he said proudly.

At noon in Gardez, there was a familiar rumble--a missile. The missile was later found buried in the mud walls of a local nongovernmental agency whose offices were empty. The only casualties were the windows in what, amazingly, was one of the few attacks in all of Afghanistan on October 9. As one senior adviser at the U.S. Embassy told me, "We were quite pleased.... Everybody had predicted Armageddon here, but the security was so intense [the Taliban] did not have the opportunity to do anything." Other security experts said the peaceful turnout showed that the Taliban are a spent force, lacking the resources and support within Afghanistan to carry out serious attacks.

"I was deeply impressed," said one EU official sent to monitor the vote. "I covered nine voting centers. All were incredibly orderly. In the morning, we went out expecting problems in security, but there were orderly queues. People were doing their work diligently." American officials concurred. One noted with wonder that, in this normally chaotic society, "people stood politely in line" to vote. Opposition parties had complained that the supposedly indelible ink came off easily, allowing Afghans to vote more than once. Yet foreign observers, amazed that the election had gone off so well in a country destroyed by years of war, downplayed the ink fiasco. Indeed, the EU official dismissed the ink affair as a red herring created by opposition parties to cloud the final results, which are likely to favor Karzai heavily.

Afghans, ironically, were not as impressed by the achievement. While the foreigners in Kabul were happy with a vote that met some standards of fairness, many Afghans had hoped for an almost-pristine election. Andrew Wilder, head of the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, a Kabul think tank, predicted this. "While the international community may be willing to accept a deeply flawed election given current conditions in Afghanistan, the Afghan public may not," his think tank reported in a recent publication titled "Free, Fair, or Flawed: Challenges for Legitimate Elections in Afghanistan." "Afghans had high hopes--in some ways dangerously high--that the elections are going to result in positive political change," Wilder told me. "They had high hopes for the Bonn Agreement, but these hopes were crushed when they saw many of the most powerful positions in the new government handed over to representatives of the warring factions they held accountable for much of the tragedy of the last two decades.... Many Afghans see the upcoming elections as their last opportunity to reject the status quo and the politics of the past."

Given this idealism, some Afghans were disappointed by the election itself. By the afternoon in Gardez, men began to complain that the ink was easily removed, and soon dozens indignantly showed how a little saliva could smear it off. They were offended that a process they held sacred had been violated and complained that people could now vote twice. Soon, local radio was announcing that many of the opposition candidates were rejecting the election because the ink could be easily wiped off of thumbs throughout the country.

In Gardez, an elegantly dressed woman in a black dress with gold necklaces sat observing the voters. Anahita Ada was a representative of Yunis Qanooni, Karzai's main rival, sent, like thousands of others, to monitor the elections. A former delegate to the constitutional loya jirga, she was visibly upset by the ink. "These elections are not fair," she said. "I am boycotting them, ... and our supporters have stopped voting. We don't want such an election." Narulla, a burly, bearded man who ran five voting locations in the region, was also concerned, demonstrating for journalists how easily the ink was removed.

But there is still time to win back the disaffected. Wilder says that what happens in the days immediately following the election could be more important than election day itself. Karzai and other Afghan leaders need to pick an inclusive cabinet and to reassure Afghans that all their votes are being counted. "We need to make sure ... that it is perceived to be a meaningful democratic experience by Afghan voters," Wilder said. "If Afghans see the new president appoint a cabinet dominated by the same faces they blame for much of the past twenty-five years of war, Afghans will ask, `What was the point of holding elections?' ... I don't think we're going to have another opportunity like this one to get it right."