Bar set low for Afghan parliamentary elections

[unhappycamper]

Bar set low for Afghan parliamentary elections
By Laura King, Los Angeles Times
September 16, 2010|2:23 p.m.

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan — In Afghanistan these days, the definition of success is sometimes merely the absence of calamity — a metric that may well apply to this weekend's parliamentary elections.

Threats and intimidation are certain to diminish turnout in Saturday's vote. More than 1 million voters in this nation of 32 million are being disenfranchised because they live in areas deemed too dangerous for balloting to take place. Thousands of phony voter-registration cards are known to be in circulation, raising the specter of widespread fraud.

The Obama administration has sought to dampen expectations in advance of the vote, perhaps fearing that either a major outburst of violence or a show of rampant vote-rigging would exacerbate already gnawing doubts among NATO nations about the aims of the nearly 9-year-old war.

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"These elections … are not going to be perfect," Staffan de Mistura, the head of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, told reporters this week. But he added: "We are feeling that they are going to be much better than the previous ones."

That sets the bar pretty low. Massive vote-rigging in last summer's presidential election led an oversight panel to toss out about one-third of the ballots cast for President Hamid Karzai. The Afghan leader was ultimately declared the winner after his main opponent dropped out, but the contentious aftermath of the vote left a poisonous taint on his relations with the West that lingers today.