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Afghanistan might be heading toward a power sharing agreement between the two leading presidential candidates, incumbent Hamid Karzai and former foreign minister Adbdullah Abdullah. The model has been tried in other nations but the results were mixed, as The World’s Matthew Bell reports.
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MARCO WERMAN: In Afghanistan the results are in. An international panel looking into election fraud today said incumbent President Hamid Karzai failed to get more than 50 percent of the vote. That finding is legally binding and it means Karzai faces a runoff against the second place finisher in the August election, Abdullah Abdullah. But there might be another solution to the political crisis – a power-sharing deal. The World’s Matthew Bell reports.
MATTHEW BELL: Power sharing political deals are often shotgun marriages brought about by pressure form6 the international community during times of bloodshed or civil war. And because these arrangements usually favor short-term stability over long-term reconciliation they can be far from perfect political unions. Zimbabwe and Kenya are two recent examples. James Dobbins of the RAND Corporation says these kinds of political marriages often don’t have staying power. Dobbins has worked on post-conflict reconstruction projects around the world and he says Afghanistan has one thing going for it.
JAMES DOBBINS: In other societies, in the Balkans for instance or for that matter in Iraq, there are … . The level of ethnic antipathy is so acute that some of the ethnic groups simply don’t’ want to live in the same state with the other ethnic groups. In Afghanistan the ethnic hatreds are not that acute. There have been for instance no real evidence of ethnic cleansing in Afghanistan of the sort we saw both in Iraq and in Bosnia and in Kosovo.
BELL: Ideally Dobbins says Afghanistan would hold a successful runoff election first and then Karzai and Abdullah would come to an agreement on sharing power. But it’s been nearly two months now since Afghanistan’s fraud-plagued presidential election and Dobbins says there are risks to waiting much longer.
DOBBINS: Risks in terms of like exposing voters to further insurgent activity. There are risks of further irregularities marring the second round to the point that it was again disputed which would be very alarming. And there are the risks of drift and uncertainty about who’s ruling Afghanistan in the interval. And I’m sure all of those are factors that are encouraging some people to think of this workaround solution.
BELL: If Karzai and Abdullah do make a power sharing deal it would have to accomplish two things says Afghanistan expert Alex Thier of the US Institute of Peace.
ALEX THIER: I think that it would have to make sure that there are good faces in government. Faces that people trust. Faces that people believe are going to present some new hope. It would also have to come with a very stringent agreement for the government to begin rooting out corruption and to take the issue of justice and accountability much more seriously.
BELL: Thier says Karzai has been in power for eight years and he’s largely failed to make the Afghan government work for the people and that he says has played into the hands of the Taliban.
THIER: What Afghan people are far more concerned about than the outcome of the election is the performance of the government and whether the government is going to protect them, whether it’s going to steal from them, and whether it’s going to provide them some of this international money and aid assistance that’s been flowing into the country. And so they will judge this government more on its actions than on abstract notions I think of whether the election was problematic or not.
BELL: The election is problematic for Washington however. President Obama is waiting until the election crisis is resolved to make a decision on US troop levels for Afghanistan. A White House spokesman today said it’s important for the Afghan government to make the political process legitimate. But he didn’t say how that could be accomplished. For The World I’m Matthew Bell.
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