Afghanistan’s central government has been plagued with corruption. In the latest presidential election, accusations of fraud on the part of the incumbent, Karzai, have been raised by many. Ballots from 600 of the 26,000 pollins stations in the country have been disregarded because the afghan run election commission said they have been tainted by fraud. With fraud allegations rising, a U.N.-backed commission ordered a re-count of tainted ballots.
If anyone in America is wondering why we should care about the presidential election in Afghanistan, then they’re asleep at the wheel. We cannot force a military victory in Afghanistan if the result of all we do is put a fraudulent government into power there. Local civilians have no reason to support a corrupt central government when they’re already dealing with corrupt local warlords. And trying to force them is only going to tick them off.
If the US wanted to seriously do something to help rebuild Afghanistan, they would clean up the corruption in the central government. They would get some independent group, like the UN, to go in and make sure elections are honest. And then they would see to it that the central government becomes something that is better than the local warlords. This would result in locals switching their loyalty to the central government rather than supporting the groups who are fighting it. Instead, we’re trying to beat locals into supporting the central government, and we are functionally indifferent to how corrupt and ineffective that central government is.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090908/ap_on_re_as/as_afghan_election
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