Afghan warlords hunt for votes 'Hollow victory' for Karzai feared
SHEBERGHAN, Afghanistan -- For the first time in its history, this desert town is showing off the trappings of democracy. Campaign posters decorate storefronts, and the local leader, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, has traded his military uniform for a dark suit and has hit the campaign trail.
But Sheberghan, a provincial capital in northwestern Afghanistan, is a case study in the biggest threat to Afghan democracy and in the historic presidential elections this week: the entrenched power of militia commanders like Dostum, many of whom the United States brought to power when it toppled the Taliban regime three years ago.
On Sheberghan's dusty streets, nearly everyone pledges to vote for Dostum. But privately, residents have told human-rights researchers that Dostum's armed followers are ordering people to vote for him, and are confiscating voter-registration cards from people who do not belong to his Uzbek ethnic group.
The local police chief, charged with providing impartial security for the elections, displays a life-sized Dostum poster in his office. And on Tuesday, NATO forces in the area say, police ordered shops to close to boost attendance at a campaign rally by the general, who is reported to have had his forces lock Taliban prisoners in shipping containers in the desert until they died of heat, thirst, and suffocation.
The most serious threat to the Afghan elections, set for next Saturday, is not that they will degenerate into violence -- although Taliban insurgents are expected to attack polling places in restive southern areas -- but that they will fall short of a true expression of popular will and instead cement the warlords' power, human rights workers and political analysts say.
"The fact that people don't feel free to cast their ballots as they want is the biggest problem," said John Sifton, author of a Human Rights Watch report issued Tuesday that found widespread voter intimidation by warlords, not only Taliban sympathizers in the south but also former US allies such as Dostum in the north.
Even if the clan leaders throw their support to the incumbent interim president, Hamid Karzai, he could win "a hollow victory" that will force him to keep the leaders in top Cabinet posts and in control of local areas, said Sifton, who has spent three years studying Afghanistan. That would increase the chances of violence and intimidation during the far more complex parliamentary elections next year -- a possibility that US commanders here call one of their biggest concerns.
The Bush administration has staked some of its credibility on the success of the vote on Saturday, citing Afghanistan's transformation as one of its biggest foreign-policy achievements and as a critical victory in the war on terror, a counterweight to the increasing violence in Iraq. Last week, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell acknowledged that the US occupation of Iraq has increased anti-American feelings among Muslims.
"But I think that that will be overcome in due process, because what the Muslim world will see . . . is that in Afghanistan, 10 million people who have registered to vote will vote on the 9th of October and bring in place a freely elected president," Powell said on ABC's "This Week."
A work in progress Afghans across the country express high hopes that elections will usher in the rule of law and lasting peace. But international and Afghan monitoring groups say that there are not enough international troops to guarantee security, that poll workers are undertrained, and that voters are undereducated.
Almost three years after the Taliban fell to US forces in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, Karzai's US-backed government is still in the beginning stages of disarming the warlords and building national institutions that can override their local rule. Karzai has demoted several key clan leaders from government posts in recent months. But he has scaled back plans to sideline militias before the election, reducing the goal to disarming 27,000 of the estimated 60,000 militia forces.
Not even that goal will be met, Colonel David Lamm, chief of staff of US-led forces in Afghanistan, said in an interview Friday. In some areas, militias have even been deputized to provide security at polling places, Lamm said.
Preventing violence aimed at disrupting the vote will be a challenge; 5,000 polling places are spread across a mountainous country the size of Texas, with few paved roads.
US and international forces have beefed up their presence, Lamm said, adding more than 1,000 US, Spanish, and Italian troops to the 20,000 US troops and 9,000 NATO troops in the country. Guarding the polling places will be local police, ringed by Afghan National Army troops, NATO troops, and as a last resort, Americans.
"We'll be able to get to any one of these polling places in an hour," Lamm said. Still, he added: "Are some polling places going to be blown up? Yes. Are people going to die? Yes."
Logistical challenges abound. Of the 125,000 poll workers needed, just 25,000 had been hired by early September. The joint United Nations-Afghan body running the elections says another 100,000 will be in place by Saturday. But with so little time, they will not likely be adequately trained to help a mostly illiterate population, some of whom may never have held a pen, to navigate a ballot with 18 candidates, Thomas Muller of the Kabul-based Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit said yesterday.
Only 14 percent of 700 voters surveyed by a consortium of Afghan and international organizations said they had received voter training. And voter training is subject to abuse in places where the notion of individual political choice is vague to most people.
In the village of Kalakan, north of Kabul, residents attending a campaign rally for the lone female candidate, Massouda Jalal, said someone wiser was going to tell them whom to vote for. Asked to identify the wise person, they pointed to the local school principal hired by the UN to teach them how the ballot worked.
And because large monitoring groups bowed out over security concerns, there are just 88 international observers.
"It's not an American democracy, and maybe that's too much to expect," Lamm said.
Fear and populism The warlords are the thorniest problem because the government depends on them to maintain stability, and their fearsomeness is mixed with populist appeal.
They are a legacy of decades of fighting. Armed by the United States to drive Soviet troops from Afghanistan, they succeeded in 1992, only to descend into factional fighting that killed tens of thousands of civilians. In 1996, the Taliban fought their way to power and made the country a sanctuary for Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda.
After invading, the United States fought alongside commanders like Dostum to defeat the Taliban. Now, many clan leaders hold government posts and are using their clout to push for or against Karzai in the election.
In Sheberghan, an 11-hour drive from Kabul through the jagged Hindu Kush mountains and across a desert plain, Dostum's face adorns buildings, shop fronts, and car dashboards. At his aqua-and-peach mansion surrounded by rose gardens, known simply as 'the palace," a spokesman, Faizullah Zaki, said Dostum was making the transition to civilian politics.
"No one has the right to call Dostum a warlord," he said Wednesday.
But a few blocks away, at the headquarters of the 53d Division, fighters, nominally transferred to a national command, proudly described themselves as "Dostum's fighting force."
On a busy street of car repair shops, Dostum was the pick of all but one man, Mohammed Amin, who happened to be the only ethnic Tajik in a crowd of Uzbeks.
"My vote is secret," he said.
Mohammed
On Tuesday, Dostum held a rally that drew about 8,000 people. The next day, in a kebab shop, the regional television channel endlessly replayed scenes of the rally. Watching it was Najimuddin, a herder from Sar-e-Pol to the south, who said he had made the three-hour journey to attend the rally after local commanders loyal to Dostum suggested it. A Pashtun, many of whose kinsmen fled reprisals from Dostum's forces against the Taliban's ethnic group, he nonetheless said he also would vote for Dostum.
But an hour's drive east, in the village of Balkh, a man named Nadr, a Pashtun whose family grows opium poppies, said commanders had threatened to confiscate voter cards from his relatives and other Pashtuns in Sheberghan lest they vote against Dostum.
"They are afraid to vote against him," he said, voicing fear that his followers would harm their children or take their horses or land.
Patronage and loyaltyAt police headquarters, an officer who asked not to be identified said nonuniformed armed men create problems for police. But in the next office, the police chief, Mohammed Nadr Fahimi, said his officers would not favor Dostum, in spite of the huge portrait of the commander over his desk. "It was here when I arrived, and I didn't want to take it down," he said.
No one in Sheberghan told a reporter that he or she had been threatened. Sifton, of the Human Rights Watch, said that meant little when Dostum could raise an army within a few days, even if some have been disarmed. "The threat is implied," Sifton said. "Because for 24 years, the people who buck the powerful get capped."
In the meantime, however, Dostum has spread patronage to win real loyalty.
At the youth center of his political party, Dostum funds classes for young men to learn English and Persian literature. In a classroom lined with 10 new computers, Fazel Ahmed, 15, practiced making spreadsheets. Asked who was going to be president, he exclaimed, "Dostum!"
Four women headed to a wedding -- wearing no burkas and sporting purple lipstick -- vowed to vote for Dostum because he allows freedom to women. "He lets women study in college and schools and work anywhere they want," said Friba Farhat, a teacher.
A Western analyst in Kabul, who asked that he and his organization not be named, to protect local workers in Sheberghan, noted that Dostum has come farther than some commanders in realizing that if the election shows he has a popular mandate, "he can't be dismissed as just a warlord."
At his rally, Dostum struck the notes of a politician, telling voters that their vote counts.
"Lots of money was donated for Afghanistan, but we don't see the results," he told the crowd. "The government has been in power two years, and they haven't done anything."
Anne Barnard can be reached at abarnard@globe.com.
