Election Day

It’s finally here. I’m up EARLY this morning (4? 5? Don’t even remember now), to head out to the JEMB communications center. I really wanted to go out with some of the Kiwi patrols doing election security out in the various districts, but they go out for 7-10 days at a shot, and it is hard to get all of my work done when I am that far from base. We compromise and send out one in-town observation team with my USDA colleague Stacy (who took some great pictures of stuff she saw all day -- I'll try to insert them later when the internet connection works a little better), and I sit at the coms network and report back to the Embassy in Kabul what we find out.

It’s a slow day. A really slow day. I get bored, pretty quick. Reading my copy of Ghost Wars, (The book is a great account of how we got from the ’79 student revolt in Iran, the Mujahadeen war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the rise of Osama bin Laden, and ultimately September 11. Hindsight is hell sometimes.) listening to the various reports filter in. A rocket has hit the UN Compound in Kabul. Voting started late in a lot of places, but got righted pretty quick. Numbers ran high later in the morning, but have relaxed. There are some skirmishes, and some scuffles (one guy came in to "show" some women how to vote, and they turned on him, throwing him, the ballot box, the election official, and a few other things out into the street!), but nothing like what was expected.

The afternoon is similarly quiet. The security guys have hooked up a satellite TV with hundreds of stations on it, and they have settled on one that shows Italian remakes of 80’s hit music in some bizarre costumes. Ok, the women are gorgeous, even with the bad hair, but this is far from expected.

Four o’clock rolls around. Voting does not stop right away, but by 5:00 p.m., all is quiet. Now all the ballots must find their way back to the provincial capitals, wherever JEMB built the Provincial Counting Center, so that we can find out who are the winners, and who are the losers. No CNN flash predictions of victory here -- we won’t know who will make up the wolesi jirga and the provincial council until October 22. I wonder how the losers are going to take losing. We’ll find out soon enough, I guess.