“Taliban, Militias Stand in the Way Of Afghan Ballot: Parliament Election Delayed Amid Security Concerns; Mr. Razek’s Difficult Sell; ‘Infidel Working for Infidels,’” by Yaroslav Trofimov, Wall Street Journal, 13 July, p A1.
“Jalal Jousts Karzai, Status Quo: Afghan Woman Campaigns to Lead Country Past Taliban Legacy,” by Yaroslav Trofimov, WSJ, 13 July, p. A12.
The countryside of Afghanistan is still so under the control of the Taliban that there are significant swaths where no one has yet dared register for the upcoming national elections—people are simply scared to death. You carry a voter-registration card in these parts and the Taliban catch you, it’s an instant death sentence.
When I read about stuff like that, the first words that come into my mind are, “Yea though I walk through the valley of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me."
Why? Because whenever I imagine that sort of ending, I know those are the words I’d reach for.
Who’s sporting the rod and staff on this one? That would be U.S. Army helicopters that subsequently “lobbed missiles into a mountainside” where, just a few days earlier, the Taliban executed 16 Afghanis whose only crime was that they registered to vote. Call them martyrs for democracy.
The Taliban and their bloody terror still rule much of the countryside in Afghanistan, and they base their violence on the myth that they’re resisting a U.S.-led “crusade” to dominate the Islamic world. Yeah, and the price of submission is the promise to take your life in your hands by registering to vote.
Some f--kin’ empire.
Last week, the joint U.N.-Afghan body running the elections announced that because of security problems voting for parliament, planned for September, will be postponed until next April or May. Voting for president, initially planned for June, will take place on Oct. 9. The U.S.-based incumbent, Hamid Karzai, is expected to win, but it’s unclear whether enough people will vote to provide him with democratic legitimacy.
The October vote is considered a harbinger of what may come in America’s highest-stakes experiment in transplanting Western democracy: Iraq, an even more violence-plagued national where elections are expected early next year.”
With “night letters” being slipped under doors threatening electoral workers with death, it’s no surprise that voter-registration teams have penetrated only 18 of south Afghanistan’s 50 administrative districts. International observers are expected to be housed in a “handful of safe zones on election day.”
You can call it crazy or naïve, but I really believe this is God’s work—whatever you want to call him. If wanting to simply vote is enough to get you killed, then there can be no doubt that we’re on the right side of whatever clash of civilizations you want to call this. Don’t give a rat’s ass who they vote for, just that they actually get the chance to vote.
Meanwhile, a lone woman is running a Quixotic campaign against Karzai:
Mr. Karzai, who has secured the support of Afghanistan’s most powerful warlords as well as American backing, looks unlikely to lose at the polls. Yet, in her relentless campaigning, Ms. Jalal, a 41-year-old pediatrician, already has become an idol for many urbane young Afghans who are unhappy both with the status quo and the misogynist Taliban theocracy that preceded Mr. Karzai’s regime.
“Reform has not taken place. We see no safety or security. The life of the ordinary people has not changed much because all that money was not spent on them,” Ms. Jalal says in her bare apartment in a Soviet-built housing block here, as dozens of starry-eyed university students eager to help wait for an audience. For Ms. Jalal, who wears a veil and conservative dress—but not the all-covering burka that was once mandatory—it isn’t her first time running against Mr. Karzai. In June 2002, she was his primary challenger at the loya jirga, the traditional Afghan grand council that elected the transitional government.
Back then, she received 12% of the loya jirga votes after refusing to withdraw her candidacy in exchange for a senior government position. The most prominent warlord, Tajik Northern Alliance commander Marshall Mohammed Fahim—who is now Afghanistan’s vice president and minister of defense—was so angry that he publicly upbraided Ms. Jalal’s husband for allowing what he considered extreme impudence.
Ms. Jalal, whose popularity stems from years of helping victims of conflicts between warlords, such as Mr. Fahim, wasn’t intimidated. These days, she is focusing her campaign on tapping ordinary Afghans’ resentment with the warlords’ continuing power. Her harshest criticism of Mr. Karzai zeroes in on his alleged deal with the leading warlords this spring. In that meeting, the commanders of Afghanistan’s biggest militias told Mr. Karzai that they won’t field rival presidential candidates, and in exchange asked for senior positions in Afghanistan’s future government—a rerun of the deal-making at the 2002 loya jirga.
“He’s the candidate of warlords. This is a big disgrace,” Ms. Jalal charges, dismissing Mr. Karzai’s insistence that he had made no formal trade-off for the militias’ support.
Unlike Mr. Karzai, who belongs to the Pashtun ethnic group, the biggest and traditionally dominant in Afghanistan, Ms. Jalal hails from the more cosmopolitan and less tribal Tajik community—a fact that is likely to make her chances slim outside northern Afghanistan and Kabul. Unlike the Pashtuns, whose traditional code of honor holds that women should never leave their husband’s house, Afghan Tajiks are more open to the idea of women’s rights.”
That, my friends, is some real courage.
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