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This Week's Podcast: Peter Galbraith on What Went Wrong in the Afghanistan Elections -- And What to Do Now

November 05, 2009 8:05 AM

On the Political Punch Podcast this week, we spoke to Peter Galbraith, recently fired as deputy envoy of the United Nations Secretary General in Afghanistan.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon fired Galbraith in October for what he says was a disagreement with his superiors about whether to intervene and report “ghost” polling centers -- facilities identified on a map but that didn’t exist in actuality -- in southern and eastern Afghanistan.

You can download the podcast on iTunes or listen HERE. The Podcast is produced by Huma Khan.

Galbraith says there were 1,300 to 1,500 bogus polling centers in the August election.

“The security planning that had been going on up until that point in time really hadn’t focused on this problem," he told us. "It had focused on two separate things, one was how many policemen have different polling centers and second, how the international forces would be deployed. But nobody looked at the question of where these polling centers actually were, so this was basically that I was doing, but once I began to raise it everybody recognized that indeed this was a problem."
 
But Galbraith said he got into a dispute with the top UN official in Afghanistan, Kai Eide, when he tried to report the discrepancy to the Independent Election Commission and eliminate the number of such polling centers.

Why did Eide oppose Galbraith making an issue out of these bogus polling centers? Was it that even with a flawed election, all the world can hope for out of Afghanistan right now are baby steps?

“At first, the notion that these were baby steps," Galbraith said. "This was an Afghan-run process. I think that reflected his thinking."

"But the problem with that is that, first the international community was paying for these elections -- mostly American taxpayers some $300 million -- and I think they expected the United Nations not to just run, support any old election but to support an honest election," he continued.

“And secondly -- and this is the much more important point -- these elections were critical to stability in Afghanistan and therefore critical to the success of the international military mission for which there were already 100,000 troops and the failure of the United Nations to take steps that could’ve reduced the risk of fraud and then dealt properly and promptly with the fraud that took place complicated that military mission enormously. So there was a lot at stake in these elections and the head of the UN mission didn’t deal with it.”

Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai agreed to a runoff election after fraudulent votes were thrown out and he was found not to have obtained the 50 percent of votes needed to avoid a runoff. Galbraith says that if all the fraudulent votes had been dismissed, the real count would actually would’ve been only 41 percent in favor of Karzai.

But the runoff, which was to take place this weekend, was cancelled when Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai’s main opponent, dropped out. Galbraith says his move doesn’t come as much of a surprise considering the issue of fraudulent polling centers still wouldn’t have been resolved in the runoff.

“The same 1,200, 1,500 polling centers that produced a million phony votes were going to remain open. Abdullah wanted them closed and actually at this point, the United Nations wanted them closed, but not only that, the independent election commission, the pro Karzai body, actually decided they were going to increase the number of polling centers as compared to those that existed in the first round,” Galbraith says.

“The second problem was that in every case where there was fraud, the staff of the election commission either committed the fraud, collaborated with those who committed the fraud or knew of the fraud and failed to report it. And so Abdullah wanted these staff people who were involved in the fraud to be replaced. The commission said they would replace some of them and then proceeded to re-hire them and under those circumstances he rightly felt that there couldn’t be a fair second round.”

The United States government has asked Karzai to fight corruption, and today, Eide sent a stern warning to Karzai that he can’t do “whatever” because of the strategic importance of Afghanistan to donor countries, and he gave the Afghan Government six months to implement reforms that are “un-ambiguous, concrete and serious.”  But Galbraith says change is unlikely to happen, considering the Afghan president is not seen as a legitimate leader by his own people.

“Some international imposed conditions on Karzai are not really a substitute for having had an honest election. And my sense is that all we’re going to get from Karzai is the same promises he’s been providing for the last eight years and no results,” Galbraith said. “This guy has been in power... seven years and he’s not going to change his stripes.”

Galbraith says he would not recommend pulling out of Afghanistan, but that sending more troops is unlikely to have any positive impact.

“Karzai’s seen as hopelessly tainted with the fraud. In those circumstance, Mr. President, your counter-insurgency strategy requires a credible vocal partner. Karzai is not a credible vocal partner and therefore sending 40,000 additional troops to help him is not going to work and therefore it’s simply a waste of resources to send them. I wouldn’t withdraw because we’ve had a  major investment in Afghanistan since 2001. We don’t want to lose that but I wouldn’t increase the number of troops because the essential condition of a credible vocal partner is not there,” he said.

For more of our discussion with Peter Galbraith, you can download the full podcast on iTunes or listen HERE.

-- jpt

 

November 5, 2009 in Afghanistan | Permalink | Share | User Comments (11)

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