WHAT’S CLEAR about Afghanistan’s parliamentary elections, which were held on September 18th, is that they will bring to Afghanistan a popularly-elected legislative body working under a constitution for the first time in its history. The new parliament should open for its first session sometime in December. What’s far from clear is whether these elections will represent the fledgling steps of a stable and sustainable democracy in Central Asia.
The fact that democratic elections were successfully held amidst a persistently unstable security environment might bring some hope that stability is around the corner. Taliban threats to disrupt the elections went mostly unfulfilled–what violence there was, including the assassination of nine candidates–did not derail the elections. And so far, other than a few protests, the complaints period has been mostly uneventful (though the governor of Kunar has issued arrest warrants for Afghan nationals working on elections in his province).
But what hope these elections have brought should be tempered with a healthy dose of caution. Given the crop of new parliamentarians who are scheduled to take their seats in December, the elections might well have the effect of undermining Afghanistan’s quest for a stable democracy. That’s because the new parliament will be dominated by regional drug lords and warlords who have been engaged in armed conflict with each other for decades, and who are now legitimized by a $160 million internationally-mandated election.
A QUICK GLANCE at some of the newly elected parliamentarians is worrisome. Yunus Qanuni and Abdul Rassoul Sayyaf both won seats in Kabul. Placing second to Karzai in his 2004 presidential bid, Qanuni was backed by the feared Northern Alliance strongman Qasim Fahim. A hardliner and associate of Osama bin Laden’s during the jihad years, Sayyaf is responsible for much of Kabul’s destruction and the wholesale slaughter of thousands of Hazaras (one of Afghanistan’s ethnic minorities). Sayad Muhammad Gulabzoy won a seat in Khost. A former communist general, he was Minister of Interior during the Soviet occupation, and is tied to the 1973 and 1978 coups. Abdul Salam Rocketi, a former Taliban commander, won a seat in Zabul. The list of unsavory goes on.
According to the Independent Human Rights Commission, 60 percent of the new parliamentarians have suspected links to armed militias. This might be a conservative estimate. Candidates were required to disarm before running for office. But a candidate’s allies need not disarm. None of this means that these politicians or their colleagues with similarly worrisome histories are incapable of contributing to a stable, democratic Afghanistan–it doesn’t preclude cooperation. It does mean that there is some significantly bad blood between many of the parliamentarians, which might well get in the way of them remembering their duties to craft legislation for the citizens of Afghanistan.
THE REACTION to the elections from an Afghan colleague of mine, Hekmatullah, is telling. It’s a reaction shared by many of the Afghans with whom I speak. As the results of the ballot count in his province became clear, Hekmatullah said to me, “I’m sad for the Afghan people.” Why, I asked. “Because these people will not work for Afghanistan.” He went on to explain that one of the elected parliamentarians for his province is the uncle of a police commander who reportedly threatened voters as they went to the polls in his jurisdiction. These days “police commander” is often shorthand for “drugs and arms trafficker,” of which Afghanistan currently has plenty. Links to opium trafficking will be hardly uncommon amongst the new legislators.
Hekmatullah added, with some dismay, “I did not know you could be elected with not many votes.” He’s right. In the province where I am working, the highest vote taker won his seat with 10 percent of the votes, while the fifth-place finisher (who won the province’s last seat) garnered 3.5 percent of the votes. The sixth place candidate missed a seat by fewer than 700 votes. But in other provinces the difference between winning and losing a seat might be as few as two votes, as was the case in the eastern province of Ghazni. The reality of these elections is that that the winners simply do not have a mandate of support to take with them to Kabul.
ONE MIGHT be tempted to find some hope for Afghanistan in the fact that Malalai Joya finished second in the polls in Farah, winning her seat outright–and not relying on the seat reserved for women. The optimistic outlook is that voters accepted her, despite the fact that she is a women in a predominantly conservative Pashtun region which has a significant Taliban presence. The fact that she is outspoken in her opposition to the Taliban and to warlords may have helped her win support amongst some voters. It will undoubtedly make her powerful enemies amongst her new colleagues as well.
A closer look at Malalai Joya’s election, however, reveals a problem of weak support she shares with almost all her new colleagues. She won her seat by garnering about 7,800 votes out of roughly 106,000 cast votes–hardly a substantial constituency. Of 47 candidates on the ballot in Farah province, the five parliamentary seats together were won with a third of all votes cast, which means that two-thirds of voters didn’t vote for any of the winners. How democratic is an elections where five winners get seats with one-third of the vote? And how effective can a parliamentarian be in standing up to already powerful warlords when support at home is so weak? Even if Malalai Joya could count on her four provincial colleagues for support (which she can’t), theirs is a minority constituency.
Malalai Joya’s case is not unique. All her colleagues also won their seats with relatively weak support. This is bad for legislators who have the interests of the Afghan people at heart. On the other hand, weak support may help limit the influence of the warlords in parliament, and it may help Karzai exercise greater influence over the legislative process. But the accompanying fact is that the lion’s share of resources available for influencing Afghan politics are already controlled by the many new parliamentarians who have shaped Afghan politics during the past 30 years of war–as Communists, as radical Islamists, as jihadists, as traffickers, as militia commanders of one stripe or another. The resources that buy political influence in Afghanistan are already in their hands. Now they have a democratic election to legitimize them.
COMPOUNDING the already troubling issues of who will be sitting in parliament come December is the nature of the emerging political parties. Despite a deliberate effort to discourage them–because of the country’s bad experience under the Communists in the 1980s–today there are over 70 registered political parties in Afghanistan. In April of this year, for instance, Qanuni was named head of an 11-party coalition called the “Afghanistan National Coordination Front” which consists of the Tajik groups that formed the Northern Alliance during the Afghan civil war in the ’90s. Similarly, the Pashtun-dominated Taliban worked behind the scenes to ensure the success of their favored candidates
This ethnicity-based political activity is not new to Afghanistan, but it is troubling if it prefigures the shape politics will take in the new parliament, where war-time ethnic allegiances could resurface in the name of democracy. Ethnic coalitions will mean more of the same in a country that was divided along ethnic lines not many years ago. Just how much a part of the political process such coalitions will be remains a question, as they could well devolve to resemble their violent predecessors.
Viewing the elections through an optimistic lens, a U.S. Embassy official told me that elections were never going to bring saints to Afghanistan’s parliament, but that it would bring strong people who are accustomed to gathering and holding power–thugs perhaps, he said, but they’re also people who want to make changes in their own provinces. Perhaps there’s some small comfort in the fact that these thugs are at least participating in a democratic procedure–starting in December Tajiks, Pashtun, Hazaras, Communists, Jihadists, regional strongmen, and Taliban sympathizers will all be sitting at the same table.
Now that this combustible hodge-podge of allies and enemies have been legitimized by a democratic election the question is, How will they wield their democratically-endowed power? No one quite knows.
Peter Church works for an international organization in Afghanistan.
