THE legitimacy of Afghan elections this year could be jeopardized if dominant ethnic Pashtuns fail to vote due to poor security and disenchantment with President Hamid Karzai, raising the prospect of even worse violence. Fighting is already at its heaviest since US-led forces toppled the Taleban in 2001, but almost all battles are in the south and east; areas populated by Pashtuns, many of them angry at their perceived exclusion from power and alleged abuses by foreign troops. If Pashtuns feel more disenfranchised after the polls due in September, the impoverished and traumatized country could be polarized further still and violence could reach new peaks. “Pashtuns are less likely to participate in elections because of bad security and yet they represent the largest part of the Afghan population,” said Wahid Mojdah, a political analyst and expert on the Taleban. “For 150 years the Pashtuns have been in government in Afghanistan, in every phase that Pashtuns have been out of power there has been war in Afghanistan,” he said. Recognizing that Pashtun participation is key to ensuring success in the presidential election, the United States is to deploy most of its planned 20,000 to 30,000 extra troops to secure the south. “With the introduction of two additional brigades, the regional commander in the south should have sufficient manpower to ensure successful elections,” said one US defence official at the Pentagon, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Karzai, a Pashtun from the southern province of Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taleban, has lost a good deal of public support due to his failure to improve security and clean up endemic official corruption since he was elected in 2004. “There's a clear sense that people haven't been given what they were promised. It was implied there would be stability and democracy and I don't think that has happened at all,” said an international analyst in Afghanistan, who declined to be named. Many Pashtuns also feel Karzai has given too much power to northerners who helped US troops oust the Taleban. North and South In a country where even voting for the Afghan equivalent of Pop Idol was clearly split along ethnic lines, the next presidential election is likely to be similar to the last when results closely mirrored the country's ethnic divisions. The first hurdle is the registration of voters which begins in the southern Pashtun heartlands in eight days' time. A senior electoral official said if security did not improve in the south, voter registration would be low. In Ghazni province, southwest of Kabul, the Taleban have made great inroads in the last two years, but it is still more secure than the volatile southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand. Even so, election officials were not able to reach large parts of heavily populated, but remote Pashtun districts of Ghazni because of the strength of the Taleban there, Habib Rahman, head of the provincial council, told Reuters. By contrast, voter registration in the mainly ethnic Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek provinces of the north has already been completed without major incident. “It's completely different from the south, we could provide security for the voters even with just one or two policemen, but you cannot do the same in the south,” said Mohammad Omar Sulaimani, governor of Kunduz province in the north. A possible rival Pashtun candidate to Karzai could also split the vote in the south and east and, were it not for the deep divisions among the minority groups, could lead to an upset. “An Uzbek, a Hazara or Tajik winning would destabilize the country,” Mojdah said. “It's unlikely this would happen, but if it does it will lead to many problems in Afghanistan ... the Taleban do not want a US-style democracy here.” Low voter registration in the south might not necessarily mean a low turnout in the election as those who still have voting cards from the 2004 poll can use them instead and officials admit it is impossible to know how many have kept their old cards. Tight security then only needs to be imposed on election day itself, diplomats say. If close to 100,000 foreign troops and some 140,000 Afghan security forces cannot secure the country for “just one goddamn day,” a senior Western diplomat said, then “what the hell are we doing here?”
