On April 5th, the scheduled date of Afghanistan’s upcoming Presidential election, there will be around a dozen polling centers in Chak, a narrow valley of mud homes and alfalfa farms that lies some forty miles from Kabul. A few of the centers, which are essentially rooms with a section curtained off for voting, will be in schools; others will be in mosques. At least two will be in tents pitched on mountain slopes, near the grazing ranges of nomadic herders. Freshly painted campaign billboards loom over the road into the valley. Tens of thousands of ballots are ready for delivery, and officials are considering a helicopter drop for some of the valley’s most remote reaches. None of this will matter, though, because on Election Day there will not be a single voter or election worker in any of Chak’s polling centers. When I asked a U.S.-backed militia commander in the area, whom I will call Raqib, to explain why, he drew a finger across his throat, and said, “Taliban.”
The country’s first democratic Presidential contest without Hamid Karzai—who is prevented by term limits from seeking reëlection—is supposed to represent a milestone, one of the rare peaceful transitions of power in the nation’s history. But these elections will take place in a barely functioning state: the Taliban insurgency still rages in roughly half the country, where it often wields de facto authority. In these areas, casting a vote amounts to a death wish, because the Taliban view the exercise as traitorous. Election authorities have classified three thousand one hundred and forty of the six thousand eight hundred and forty-five polling stations as unsafe; large swathes of the country, particularly in the south and east, might see almost no turnout.
As the elections approach, the Taliban have stepped up attacks and assassinations, pushing the country to levels of violence not seen since 2009. Over the weekend, insurgents in Kabul stormed an N.G.O. compound and attacked the election-commission headquarters. Although casualties were limited, the rising insecurity has prompted the flight of many international observers and monitors. In Wardak, the province southwest of Kabul where Raqib heads a militia, most districts are under Taliban control. Near the turnoff on the highway to Chak, there is a renovated, single-story schoolhouse that will serve as the main polling center for the area; it sits on territory controlled by Raqib’s forces. “These few kilometres of highway are mine. And that side, too,” he said, pointing to roadside scrubland. “Everything else”—he motioned toward mud villages dotting the nearby foothills—“is Taliban.”
No one from those villages will venture to the polling center on Election Day, but Raqib is shopping his services to the major candidates to “secure” the area—meaning his men will control access to the polling sites, allowing only paid campaign agents inside. In the previous two elections, in 2004 and 2009, campaign workers played an instrumental role in stuffing ballot boxes on behalf of their candidates.
“I’ve seen a couple of the big candidates, and they’re offering good money,” Raqib said, citing one offer of about five thousand dollars. He hasn’t yet decided whom to work with, but he believes the experience will be similar to the parliamentary polls held in 2010. Back then, I was reporting in Wardak, and watched as Raqib detained the agents of rival candidates, while allowing those of his backers to stuff ballots unmolested.
This time, though, he will face stiff competition. The highway under his domain links the Bagram and Kandahar airfields, the country’s two major U.S. military installations, and it has spawned an ecosystem of ultra-rich fuel and trucking contractors, who dominate Wardak politics. In the 2009 Presidential election, some of them coöperated to stuff ballots at empty polling sites on behalf of Hamid Karzai. (During the 2010 polls, I saw election agents working for one contractor, Wahedullah Kalimzai, detained for stealing votes at the very same schoolhouse on the highway to Chak.) Now the contractors are auctioning their ballot-stuffing services in competition with one another.
“They’ll decide who gets the votes in my province,” said Hazrat Janan, a prominent Wardak official, who is widely considered to be independent from what he calls the “contractor mafia.” When I met him in Kabul last month, he worried that the competition for vote-stealing privileges could turn violent. Many of the contractors and American-backed militia commanders have maintained subterranean links with the Taliban, as an insurance policy against assassination, and as a means of squeezing their rivals. According to Janan and other Wardak officials, for instance, one prominent local contractor even gifted motorcycles to a Taliban unit to encourage them to attack the fuel convoys of competing contractors. Raqib, who is himself a former Taliban commander, admitted, “I keep ties with all sides.” Referring to my presence in Wardak, he added, “I told the Taliban, ‘I have a guest today, so don’t come to the roadside or make any problems.’ ”
While the systematic fraud might simply seem like another excess of a preternaturally graft-ridden state, there may be no other way to conduct the election. In Kabul, I went to see Mullah Tarakhel Mohammadi, a pugnacious parliamentarian who, in the most recent Presidential election, was accused of engineering a vote-stealing operation for Karzai in the area he represents, on the eastern outskirts of the city. At his office, Tarakhel was protected by a fearsome security detail: a half dozen Kalashnikov-bearing men in Afghan clothes, a few in sunglasses and camouflage, and one in leather pants, holding a pistol. Tarakhel and his crew were of short temper; two years ago, he ordered his bodyguards to open fire on a crowd, killing two and wounding seven, in response to a taunt. Last year, one of his gunmen unloaded on a health clinic, raking it with heavy gunfire and wounding a fourteen-year-old boy.
“We’re afraid, because in the south and east there is no security, and no one will be able to vote. Only the north can vote,” Tarakhel told me. “What would happen then? Maybe another civil war.” Most Pashtuns, the country’s ethnic majority, hail from the south and east, meaning that they would effectively be disenfranchised in an honest election. Tarakhel declined to answer questions about his own activities during the previous Presidential election. But, he explained, without widespread fraud, Karzai, a Pashtun, would have lost the 2009 vote in a landslide simply because his constituency happened to live in the war-torn areas. “You have to cheat to be fair,” Tarakhel said.
So, if the eight Presidential hopefuls want a strong showing in the Pashtun areas, they’ll need to work with ballot-stuffing strongmen like Raqib, who operate in the gray zone between official and paramilitary that defines so much of the Afghan countryside. This means, though, that the Pashtun vote will likely be split—and several prominent Karzai backers told me they worry that a division of the vote among multiple candidates could weaken his influence over the incoming administration. In fact, Karzai appears to be maneuvering to prevent such an outcome. First, he reportedly brokered an alliance between the Pashtun technocrat Ashraf Ghani and the Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, who will likely bring millions of northern Uzbek votes with him, thereby splitting the northern vote. Karzai’s team then pressured the President’s brother, Qayum Karzai, to drop out of the race in favor of Zalmay Rassoul, his preferred candidate. Rassoul, a Francophone physician without an independent base, appears to be just weak enough for Karzai to exert a Putin-like leverage over the next administration. A series of other mergers—many in Rassoul’s favor—are rumored to be in the works. So, by Election Day, the field might be whittled down to four major candidates: Ghani, Rassoul, the 2009 runner-up Abdullah Abdullah, and the fundamentalist warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf.
Who among them will have the contacts, patronage ties, and funding to be able to cultivate the majority of countryside strongmen? Hajji Muhammad Baretz, a tribal elder from Kandahar, believes that, if the previous Presidential polls are any guide, he knows the answer. On the morning of Election Day in 2009, Baretz told me, his family arrived at the main polling center in the Shorawak district to find it padlocked and empty. Dozens of nearby centers were also closed, Baretz said, and police officers had taken the ballot boxes to the precinct headquarters to stuff in favor of Hamid Karzai. The head of the Kandahar police force is Abdul Raziq, a U.S. ally with a grisly human-rights record, who is also a staunch Karzai supporter. “The same thing will happen this time around,” Baretz told me. “You won’t see a single voter in Shorawak.” Through the police, Raziq controls the ballot-distribution system in Kandahar, and in many rural polling sites his force, rather than election authorities, will collect the ballots. This means, Baretz predicted, that Zalmay Rassoul will win Kandahar.
It’s too soon to say whether Rassoul will be able to leverage Karzai’s patronage networks throughout the country—or if, as in Wardak, those networks have become splintered beyond recognition, leaving a free market of competing power brokers. What is certain, however, is that these maneuvers have little connection to the concerns of ordinary Afghans. In Wardak, I came across a campaign rally for Zalmay Rassoul at a large hotel in the provincial capital. There were more than forty police and Army trucks on hand, including Afghan special-forces units, because Rassoul’s Vice-Presidential candidate, Habeeba Sarobi, was speaking. The Rassoul campaign was the first to venture into Wardak, and the auditorium was packed with men and women from the surrounding villages. Bibi Guldana, a middle-aged housewife, told me that she was paid two hundred afghanis—about four dollars—to show up. She showed me her other attendance gift, a package of bottled water, potato chips, and a candy bar, which she clutched as if it might be taken away at a moment’s notice. The name of Habibullah Kalimzai, one of Wardak’s trucking-contractor strongmen, was printed across the package’s wrapping.
Saleh Muhammad Habibzai, the hotel’s financial manager, explained that news of the Rassoul campaign's payments had rippled through the surrounding villages, attracting a stream of poor villagers. Most, like Guldana, were indifferent to the campaign. “They spoke about peace and security,” she said. “But what do they know about such things?”
This sentiment appeared to be widespread elsewhere in Wardak. In the town of Salar, which looks like so many of the province’s derelict bazaars—with a row of shipping containers that had been converted into single-room shops, with cracked or missing windows, and iron storefronts dented by blasts—I saw two campaign billboards, one for Abdullah (“Reform and Unanimity” was the slogan) and the other for Rassoul (“Continuity and Reform and Professionalism”). But, among the people I spoke with, I couldn’t find a single person eager to cast a vote. “We are farmers,” Muhammad Aref, slouched against a small shop, told me. “When we work in our farms, the Taliban come and shoot at the police. Then the police come and harass us and don’t let us work. And you want to talk about elections?”
“It doesn’t matter whom I vote for,” one woman in Salar, who would not give her name, told me. “My husband died in the civil war. I owe thousands of dollars. Who’s going to help us? Not any of these people.” Unlike in Kabul or the peaceful north, most citizens here seemed to view the polls as a dangerous imposition—a piece of Western-orchestrated theatre that would be yet another item in the long list of events and factions and policies to be endured. The international community was talking to them about democracy and legitimacy, the Taliban was threatening them, and the warlords were pressing them to back certain candidates. “They all do it for show, for their own power,” another woman, an off-duty police officer waiting for a taxi, told me. “And we suffer for it.”
Photograph by Marco Di Lauro/Getty.
