| |
| Join Our Newsletter |
 Please Select sub-criteria |  |
|
|
|
|
| |
| Afghan Choices or American Interests? |
03 |
|
|
| |
| |
| |
Many take the presidential election of Hamid Karzai in October 2004 as a real sign that democracy has taken hold in Afghanistan. Peter Bergen argues that Karzai’s margin of victory in a largely fair election with several candidates was arguably more than President Bush received against only one main challenger in the 2004 US election. This however ignores many facts about the specific situation and politics of Afghanistan. Prior to the presidential elections numerous reports stated that US officials had approached several potential contenders and asked them to withdraw from the contest.vi Dr Massouda Jalal – the sole women candidate to stand - gave a post election interviewvii in which she described the election as a fraud perpetrated upon Afghans – a show put on by the US government to impress American voters in the year of their own presidential election. Candidates such as her were given no support whilst Karzai’s campaign was supported overtly by western nations with his campaign being littered with openings of new reconstruction projects. It was a running joke throughout the election that the American ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad was Karzai’s campaign manager in all but name. The relationship of Hamid Karzai and the US is so intimate that it is US Special Forces that provide personal security for the Afghan President.viii If reports now conclude that the recent parliamentary elections in Zimbabwe were a ‘sham’ or neither ‘free or fair', then the presidential elections in Afghanistan must be considered by any objective observer to fall into the same category.
Using security and logistic excuses, parliamentary elections that were originally scheduled for July 2004 were postponed until Spring 2005 and now they have been postponed once again until September 2005. Indeed the US control of Afghanistan is so taut that it was American Secretary of State Rice who inadvertently announced the most recent postponement of the parliamentary elections even before President Karzai had formally informed the Afghan people. Even the elections have been organised in a way that will cement Karzai and his American backers. Karzai has chosen and signed into law an unusual electoral system called the single non-transferable vote, in which each voter selects an individual candidate; rather than a form of proportional representation, which allocates seats to the parties that contest the elections. Arguably many see this election system as a way for the US to control the outcome of the parliamentary elections and this approach has been criticised by many political parties and election experts in Afghanistan as having the intention of reducing the influence of the wartime jihadi parties.ix
From an infrastructure perspective, there are few signs that progress has been made in the last three years in Afghanistan. Only one section - Kabul to Kandahar - of the national highway programme has been completed. No new power stations have been built and only an estimated 6% of Afghans receive any regular electricity. There is also a chronic lack of clean drinking water, after six years of drought, and this is causing increasing disease and premature deaths. Afghanistan's first ever National Human Development Report (NHDR), supported by the UN Development Programme (UNDP)x, launched in February 2005, revealed that the country's Human Development Index (HDI) fell close to the bottom of the 177 countries ranked by the global Human Development Report 2004, way behind all of its neighbours and only just above Burundi, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Sierra Leone. The NHDR ranks the country 173 out of 178 countries in development indices but does acknowledge on the positive side that there has been rapid progress in many fields such as health and education and that three million children have enrolled into grades 1-12 in 2002. But at the same time the NHDR states that Afghanistan still has ''the worst education system in the world'' and is the world leader in infant deaths. Life expectancy for Afghans is quoted as being only 44 years, which is 20 years less than any of its neighbours. The report provides shocking findings, including the fact that every 30 minutes a woman in Afghanistan dies from pregnancy-related causes. It also notes that 20 percent of children die before the age of five and that more than 300,000 children may have perished during the conflict. The report also says that the poorest 30 percent of the population receive only 9 percent of the national income, while the upper 30 percent receive 55 per cent. In Kabul's premier Indira Gandhi hospital children in incubators and on respirators live or die according to the lottery of whether there are power cuts to the hospital. Heating is non-existent and at times the temperature in the hospital drops to minus 10 degrees Celsius. Many of the Afghan districts have no functioning hospitals and local clinics are devoid of medicines.xi
| |
| |
| |
| |
« First < 1 2 3 4 >
Page 3 of 4 pages
| |
|
|
