It is a dangerous position for Britain to maintain that the Afghan election is legitimate until proved otherwise. The official line at the sprawling conference yesterday in Paris, which gave a seat to every government with a stake in Afghanistan, is that Afghans must decide whether the results of the polls are credible.
Perfectly respectful, in the modern fashion. Nonsensical, in that there are already 3,000 allegations of ballot box stuffing, intimidation, and so on, lodged with the Afghan Election Complaints Commission, 600 or so of which could materially affect results. And dangerous, in that if supporters of Abdullah Abdullah, the main challenger to President Hamid Karzai, think that the election has been stolen, they will turn violent.
They said as much yesterday. Mr Abdullah was talking to foreign governments, said Zalmai Younosi, his campaign chief in six northern provinces. “But if there is no result, then it is protest and violence,” he warned. Hence the new notion of a national unity government, which would shoehorn Mr Abdullah and some of his chosen ministers into a Karzai Cabinet, as the price of peace. But that is a long, long way from the vision of “rough and ready” but credible elections that British officials thought was possible just a fortnight ago.
The pretence that the “process” can follow its constitutional script has another couple of weeks to play out before it falls apart. In results released yesterday, with 60 per cent of the August 20 vote counted, Mr Karzai has 47.3 per cent, and is inching closer to the 50 per cent that would preclude a second round. Mr Abdullah is considerably behind, with 32.6 per cent. Areas in the north where he is strong have not been counted but then neither have areas in the south where Mr Karzai is strong.
It is a fair guess that Mr Karzai will inch over the critical mark, giving foreign governments a real problem. It would remove the chance of a second round early next month, the easiest way to answer the complaints of fraud. A second poll would still be exhausting, expensive and violent to conduct, but would be simpler, shorn of candidates never likely to win much, such as the MP Ramazan Bashardost, campaigning in a car like Mr Bean’s (Afghans love the Rowan Atkinson character), or Ashraf Ghani, the former Finance Minister, who is intelligent, thoughtful and with almost no constituency.
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Mr Karzai, in a lunch with Richard Holbrooke, the US envoy, a few days ago, blew up at the suggestion that he should agree to a second poll, although they made it up (sort of) over dinner. The national unity government notion then bubbled up (among US and British officials). It would be a solution to the collapsing credibility of this election, if a heavy-handed one.
All this talk of process does not disguise the problem that Mr Karzai has failed to unify the country partly because of the swirl of corruption around his government. If Mr Abdullah’s supporters feel defrauded of this election, we should take them at their word that they will express that violently.