Election Prep

For the next two weeks, priority number one for all of us are the upcoming elections. The Afghans will be voting for a parliament, the wolesi jirga, as well as a provincial council. (They were also supposed to be voting for district council reps, but the country could not decide what the districts WERE, so that one will wait until next year. We hope.)

While not as sexy as the election in 2004 for the Presidency, this round of elections may well prove more important to people’s individual health and welfare. The district councils will be the layer closest to people, and the one most responsive to their needs, but until that time, this is the best representation they will get.

The logistics of this enterprise are staggering. Afghanistan’s 34 provinces will select 259 Wolesi jirga representatives, of whom a set percentage must be women. Representation is apportioned out roughly according to population density. Not surprisingly, therefore, Kabul will have the most reps of any single province. Each province fields candidates for these 259 seats. Last time I checked, there were over 4000 candidates for the 259 seats.

So, come election day, the Afghans just walk into a booth and flip the lever or push a button, right? Yeah, as if. Afghans, after waiting in lines at separate centers for men and women, waiting for however long, will have their bona fides checked (they can only vote in their province of residence, with very, very few exceptions), to try and minimize fraud (we don’t want any cemeteries in Chicago voting in this exercise!). If they are legit, the poll station operators will give each of them two ballot books, a yellow one for the provincial election, and a blue one for the wolesi jirga. Each book has pages upon pages of candidates (averaging about 100 a page), identified primarily by their picture and their party symbol. With this many candidates, some of the symbols are a bit, well, arbitrary. My favorite was this one guy whose symbol was a wedge of Swiss cheese. :) Oh, and if you are kuchi, i.e., a nomad, you can vote anywhere, using a special kuchi ballot. (They cannot vote for the provincial council, since, technically, they are not resident in any province.) There is no room for hanging chads here. If we tried to organize something of this magnitude in the U.S., the only thing that I can guarantee would be the lawsuits. Sometimes it beggars the imagination just how much we take for granted.

Anyway, as daunting a task as this appears, the U.S., UN and other donors/sponsors have the good sense to work with an organization with lots of experience handling tough elections, the Joint Electoral Management Body (JEMB). Elections are pretty much what they do. Despite the odds (and many thought they could not make it work), they largely managed to train all of the polling station workers, get the desks, chairs, ballot boxes, ballot papers, indelible ink (to mark the fingers of the voters, avoid Chicago syndrome, as explained above), the works, out to every polling station in every district in every province in the country. They used Kamag’s (huge Russian trucks), jeeps, helicopters, trains, donkeys, planes, you name it, every resource they could think of they used to get the materials out on time.

On top of logistics, we are all concerned about election security. In other parts of the country, candidates have been assassinated (in retrospect, the U.S. way to settle this is better, at least marginally -- call out the lawyers, rather than the guys with the guns). Various bad guys (there are quite a few, not just the Taliban that you’ve all heard of -- btw, Taliban is Dari for "student." Go figure.) are putting out IEDs (improvised explosive devices) all over the place. They could be strapped to a car, a donkey, or a human being. Before I left Kabul, an IED demolished one of the US Embassy Landcruisers. Thank goodness our Landcruisers are armored, or else everyone in that truck would’ve been hurt much, much worse. (I am tempted to wax rhapsodic here about the wonders of the Landcruiser, but you’ll think I am a shill for Toyota, so I will pass for now.) The Coalition is going on the offensive against the bad guys, hoping to disrupt them so much that they cannot, in turn, disrupt election preparations and voting.

JEMB, in the meantime, has hired its own security firm to oversee the significant security aspects of ensuring that the logistics team is given the chance to do its job. The firm, KROLL, seems to know what they are doing. All of the local KROLL reps for the Central Highlands region (including Bamyan and Dai Kundi province to the south) are grizzled Welsh and Scottish guys, chain smoking, ex-British military types. They are unfazed by anything, and have a wonderful way to keep efforts in perspective. "I’ll put et straaight -- we’ve ‘ad eh cockup, an’ na mistaake," said one of the guys one day. I thought understanding Kiwi accents was hard -- this is another level!!

Despite the inevitable hiccups, things in Bamyan seem to be running smoothly. It’s all ahead for the big day -- September 18, here we come.