by David Loyn
There was some progress. In 2019, Afghanistan paid 60 percent of the $140 million cost of their own election, the first fought on a new biometric register. A version of this technology was available in 2001 and used to register returning refugees. But President Karzai wanted to keep control of the voting register and had opposed the retention of the database of more than a million identities collected by UN refugee agencies. Continued opposition to a reformed register meant that in elections up until 2018, any one of three polling cards issued since 2001 could be used in any polling station in the country—a license for fraud. After every election, international donors said, “Never again,” and every time it came to the crunch, they shelved their reservations, held their noses, and paid up.
Once Karzai had left office in 2014, it became possible to bring in a register with biometric data. There were tortuous negotiations over what information would be on the identity card. For many citizens of Afghanistan, and in particular Tajiks and Hazaras, the word Afghan means “Pashtun,” and they insisted that if they be called Afghans, they wanted their own tribal identity recorded on the card as well. The risk in measuring tribal identity was that it would reveal the actual proportions of each community in a country where there had not been a census since the 1970s.3
To vote in 2019, as well as these new biometric cards, people also needed a specific stamp, which for the first time had to be registered at a particular polling station. The complexity of this novel technology meant that on election day, many voters found they were not registered. That most patriotic and loyal of Afghans, the former army chief General Sher Muhammad Karimi, led fifteen members of his family to the polling station in his south Kabul neighborhood, and they found they were not on the list, despite having all the right documents, with relevant stamps.
STRAIN ON #ENDURINGPARTNERSHIP
Another factor in the low turnout were questions over who the U.S. were supporting. For the first time, Ashraf Ghani did not have an American blank check. The openly stated resentment of his administration at their exclusion from Zalmay Khalilzad’s peace efforts had an impact. A month before the election, the president announced the early release from jail on health grounds of Khalilullah Ferozi, the chief executive of Kabul Bank, and one of the few people arrested for the loss of most of the $900 million deposited in the bank. Ghani angrily denied that he ordered the release in return for donations to fight the election, but the Kabul ambassador, John Bass, tweeted that the decision “called into question the government’s commitment to combating corruption and making best use of donors’ support.” Bass pointed to a further widespread failure to pursue “those accused of corruption.”
In the ten days before the election, there were three more direct American attacks on the government’s competence over procurement, an area Ghani had made his direct responsibility. On September 18, Bass raised questions over why the National Procurement Authority had stopped buying fuel for the power station that supplied nearly all Kabul electricity. And the following day, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blocked $160 million in aid, a move he connected directly to the election process just over a week away.4 The U.S. would still spend $100 million of the aid in question—but off budget through contractors, not through the state. The decision felt like a kick in the teeth to a president whose professional life inside and outside Afghanistan was spent arguing for the merits of on-budget development support. A further $60 million of U.S. aid was withheld from the National Procurement Authority.
The head of the National Procurement Authority, a mild bookish engineer, Elham Omar Hotaki, requested the U.S. embassy identify the $100 million in question. In his mind, there was no secret about this; Ghani himself had flagged up problems with the southern power contracts, but there were not $100 million in pending payments. They could not have hidden anything, as the U.S. congressional watchdog, SIGAR, had a seat at the commission overseeing procurement. Afghans concluded that Pompeo was looking for anything he could find to weaken Ghani.
Two days before the election, Ghani called USAID “one of the most ineffective donor agencies” in a TV interview, adding that not more than ten cents in every dollar committed to Afghanistan actually reached the intended beneficiaries. Bass immediately took to Twitter, expressing disappointment that Ghani “overlooked the excellent work of @USAID and the details of our #enduringpartnership to improve the lives of Afghans.”
In a country where honor and respect really mattered, this spat felt serious, with strong echoes of the machinations of the U.S. and UK embassies against the reelection of President Karzai in 2009. Rumors spread on Afghan social media. If America were not backing Ghani, who were they backing?
Two-thirds of the Afghan population now had a mobile phone subscription, a revolution with liberating potential—particularly giving women in remote areas a window on the world. Watching material on smartphones in some homes in Afghanistan is a bit like the early days of television in the West, collective viewing on small screens. The eighteen presidential candidates had mixed success in social media. The various Ghani sites had many more followers than others, while one former Communist in the race, Hakim Torsan, had just twenty-five followers on Twitter, and his Facebook site was taken down by hackers. Inevitably, there were fake accounts—with many more attacking Ashraf Ghani than his main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah. And there were poorly faked images, crudely doctored images of Ghani and Abdullah alongside women, not as sophisticated as the deepfakes challenging Western democracies.5 There was little evidence of Russian or other foreign tampering of the election through bots. With “regional and international actors who want to intervene in our election with money and guns,” said Samira Sayed-Rahman, the head of Ghani’s social media campaign, “I would prefer bots over that.”6
WARLORDS
One of the most prominent of the 1980s warlords, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, was a candidate in the election. This was progress; in previous polls, several old warlords stood. He had no social media presence, as his violent Islamist history contravened Facebook policies, and sites were immediately taken down. Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e Islami faction were responsible for the murder of thousands of liberal opponents in refugee camps in Pakistan in the 1980s, the targeted murder of several journalists, and the promotion of severe restrictions on the rights of women well before the Taliban came on the scene, as well as fighting for sixteen years against international forces after 9/11. He was hugely wealthy as a result of the lavish U.S. and Saudi funding of the mujahideen in the 1980s, when the most fundamentalist Islamist groups were the best rewarded, and when he made peace in 2017, he came down from the hills with his militias intact.7 Racing around Kabul fully armed during his election campaign, they reminded people of the dark days of the early 1990s when Hekmatyar rocketed the city indiscriminately in bitter fighting with other mujahideen factions, before the Taliban arrived with their ruthless version of law and order.
Hekmatyar proved he had not changed when, in one election TV debate, he was asked by the hugely popular Pashtun singing star Naghma if she would be able to sing in Kabul’s soccer stadium under his rule, as she had just done at the Afghan Premier League final. Hekmatyar answered, “Women will enjoy more rights than men under my leadership.” But it was quickly clear that his view of rights was not as widely understood. “First, let’s allow an Islamic government to be established. Then you will not ask for a concert at the Ghazi Stadium. Rather, you will ask permission to go to the battlefield”—an answer ridiculed on social media. A new generation of Afghan women did not want to have to ask permission to do anything, and Hekmatyar stood no chance of winning. But that he stood at all showed how deeply entrenched were the values of Afghanistan nearly two decades into the long war.
In that debate on TOLO TV, Hekmatyar faced Abdullah with an empty chair between them. Ghani chose instead to do a one-on-one interview at the same time on another channel, Ariana TV, a decision that either looked presidential or frightened, and was seen as such in social media posts on both sides
. The Arg media machine was at last in professional hands under its new head, Sediq Sediqqi, a highly experienced and well-connected operator. So the general output was far better than previously, but Sediqqi was a government appointee, not a Ghani loyalist, and stood back over campaign decisions.
ELECTION STREET
There were three separate Ghani campaigns. The president’s closest team, the national security adviser, Hamdullah Mohib, and a political adviser, Fazel Fazly, decided his media appearances. A former minister, Daud Sultanzoy, ran a conventional top-down operation with press conferences.†† The third team, led by Daud Noorzai and the president’s cousin Ajmal Ghani, set up in a short street in central Kabul they renamed “Election Street” for the campaign, and were responsible for getting most votes out. Renting a couple of houses on one side of the street, and with volunteers working in a speculatively built empty hotel on the other side, managed by the Germanzais, Noorzai persuaded the few other occupied houses to allow him to seal off the street with blast walls and put up big tents, holding back-to-back rallies for thousands of people as he gathered support to reelect the president.
Unlike previous Afghan elections, there were few large rallies. A week before polling, twenty-six people were killed when a suicide bomber rode a motorbike into a security checkpoint at a Ghani rally in Charikar, north of Kabul. The same day, twenty-two people were killed in another bomb outside the U.S. embassy. That drove the campaign mostly onto social media. The Mohib-Fazly team made a long, dreamy video profile of Ghani as a man who came from nowhere, full of shots from helicopter swoops along misty valleys. In contrast, Noorzai’s team posted a more contemporary video of a pair of rappers with a patriotic riff about modern women, the army, and youth, and finishing with a rap version of the national anthem. It was shot with lots of drone footage, on clear, bright days, mostly around the gleaming Darul Aman Palace, that had stood as a giant ruin and reminder of war in the west of the city until its restoration in Ghani’s administration. The chorus, “Ghani Baba—King Asti,” went viral.
Using data gathered during the months up to polling, the Ghani campaign targeted up to eight thousand voters a day by phone ahead of election day, while tens of thousands more came through Election Street. The bottom-up approach was repeated nationwide, with small events working through Afghan influence networks, rather than the top-down patronage approach of previous campaigns. On election day itself, hundreds of volunteers were given lists to get out the vote in the improvised call center in the underground garage of the hotel, while in a conference room upstairs, tables of people worked individual provinces, including retired military officers, prepared to respond if there were security issues. Young people with smartphones sat next to war veterans with brick phones, and each played their role. There was a floor of hotel rooms higher up given over to influential backers, including a notorious warlord with a self-appointed role “protecting” Kabul.
In the event, the Taliban failed to disrupt the polls in a significant way. But a look at incidents reported in Kabul showed the risks people took while voting. Some rural areas were even more threatened. (PD: Police District. IED: improvised explosive device.)
08:20hrs, PD 11. Abdul Qadir Bidil High School Area. IED detonated near a polling station. No casualties reported at this time.
09:00hrs, PD 7. Chilesaton area. IED explosion. No casualties reported.
09:00hrs, Bagrami District, near police station. IED detonated against police vehicle. One police officer injured.
09:20hrs, PD 12. Arzan Qaimat Area, Hussain Khil High School, Explosion near polling station. No casualties.
09:20hrs, PD 8. Abdurrahman Pazwak high school, IED explosion inside polling station. 2 civilians injured.
09:35hrs, PD 19. Two mortars launched from Koh Safi which impacted in open area in PD 19 area. No casualties reported.
09:50hrs, Bagrami District, Puli Bagrami area, roadside IED explosion, no casualties reported.
10:00hrs, PD 7. Takhnikom area. Report of explosion on polling site.
10:20hrs, PD 12. IED Explosion reported in Bot Khak area
11:15hrs, PD 12. Ibrahim Khalilullah high school. Second explosion. Polling station closed.
Ghani voted in a school inside the wide security zone around the presidential compound, making a short, gracious speech thanking the Americans and others for helping with the election. The group around him included his new vice presidential candidate, the former head of the NDS intelligence service, Amrullah Saleh, who replaced Abdul Rashid Dostum on the ticket. Saleh was a Tajik with a mujahideen record, who worked closely with the CIA after 9/11. He was vehemently opposed to Pakistan and to peace talks with the Taliban.
Across town shortly before Ghani finished at his polling station, Abdullah appeared at the same time, forcing live TV channels to choose, and most chose a split screen; bad timing for Abdullah, who was downplayed, despite wearing the smartest powder-blue, double-breasted suit. In Election Street at the end of the day, Noorzai arranged simple street-food deliveries, and there was live drums and musicians as young Ghani volunteers, delirious with fatigue, whirled around in the traditional Afghan dance, the attan.
In the end, for all the hard work, of the fifteen million Afghans of voting age, only nine million were on the register, and fewer than two million valid votes were counted.8 There were many reasons for the low turnout—people were disillusioned by the American imposition of a national unity government in 2014. What was the point of voting if it did not deliver a result? And clearly, the complex registration and voting procedures did not work well. The biometric system set a high bar for votes to be counted valid. All the staff on the Independent Election Commission, who ran the process, were replaced after the corruption of the parliamentary election in 2018. This high turnover lost institutional memory, and the new staff needed to learn how to run an election. So it was year one for the eighteenth time, not just for rotating international staff in Kabul but also for Afghan institutions.
PARALLEL CEREMONIES
It took five months, until February 18, 2020, before the votes were counted. Ghani was declared victor on the slimmest of margins—50.64 percent. With his total of less than a million votes, there were inevitable questions over his legitimacy. This took the shine off what was actually an unprecedented success. Karzai had never achieved the 50 percent necessary to avoid a second round. Abdullah disputed his 39.52 percent vote share, and armed gangs roamed the streets, declaring him the victor. He appointed two governors in provinces in the north, in a direct challenge to Ghani’s authority, and a number of other leading politicians supported him.
Meanwhile in Doha, Zalmay Khalilzad had taken up where he left off when the Camp David summit was abruptly canceled in September. With the election result declared, he had a deal ready to go. All it needed was a one-week pause in hostilities to confirm the Taliban’s goodwill—not a formal cease-fire but what was called a “reduction in violence.”
Against the febrile political backdrop, with rumors of a coup, the reduction in violence had a very different atmosphere to the 2018 Eid truce. The Taliban did not stream into cities but stayed at their posts, warily eyeing their government opponents. The overwhelming sense from reporters who visited the quiet front lines was of a war that had run its course—men and weapons worn out. “This war is just destroying everything,” said the army commander in Helmand, Lieutenant General Wali Muhammad Ahmadzai. “We are tired, and the Taliban is tired.”9
Out on the ground in Marjah, the district that was supposed to have been secured with a government in a box back in 2010 under General Stanley McChrystal, Washington Post reporter Susannah George found police relieved to be able to venture from their posts without being shot. Curious Taliban visited one post, and the police invited them in, saying they had a chicken for lunch. But the Taliban said they were under orders not to go any further. Farmers between the front lines said things had improved when the Taliban returned in strength to Marjah in 2015. Now it was time for it to end. “T
ell the foreigners, just sign the agreement,” said Abdulbaqi Atrafi. “Because if they don’t, we are ready to fight for 25 more years.”10
With no major outbreaks of fighting for a week, the way was clear for a grand signing ceremony in a convention center in the Doha Sheraton—witnessed by two lines of Taliban negotiators sitting impassively at the back of the hall and afterward agreeing to selfies with visitors and delegates. They had gotten what they wanted—a commitment for foreign forces to leave a lifting of sanctions against the Taliban, and a phased release of five thousand of their prisoners from government jails. Throughout the agreement, they were referred to as the “Islamic Emirate” as they wanted to be, even if in couched in the most convoluted twenty-two-word conditional description—“the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan which is not recognized by the United States as a state and is known as the Taliban.” Moreover, there was no mention of the Ghani administration as the government of Afghanistan, nor as a future negotiating partner. The Taliban agreed only to negotiations with “Afghan sides” and to release one thousand prisoners “of the other side.”
In a parallel ceremony in Kabul at the same time, Ghani’s grievances scorched off the first page of the agreement he signed with Secretary of Defense Mark Esper that outlined the terms of the U.S./Taliban deal. Ghani insisted on a twenty-eight-word description clarifying his legal status—“the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, a member of the United Nations and recognized by the United States and the international community as a sovereign state under international law.” The NATO secretary-general was a witness in Kabul, but this was an American-Afghan deal; other coalition troops would withdraw on a timetable set in Washington.