Crossroads Afghanistan
Election who's who
The candidates and the issues
Last Updated: Tuesday, August 18, 2009 | 6:55 PM ET
By Daniel Lak, special to CBC News
An Afghan girl at an election rally in Kabul. (Reuters) Daniel Lak is an author and journalist who spent 12 years in South Asia for the BBC, covering India, Pakistan, Nepal and the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in1996. A regular contributor to CBCNews.ca, here he offers a detailed look at the candidates and the issues in what is only Afghanistan's second direct election in decades.
A more visual look at the candidates and their campaign styles can be found here at this photo gallery.
The incumbent: Hamid Karzai
When the United States led a coalition of military forces against Afghanistan's Taliban regime in 2001, Hamid Karzai swung into action.
Throughout his country's civil war in the 1990s, and after the Taliban takeover in 1996, he'd been a marginal player at best: occasionally working for some warlord or the faction that held power in Kabul, but he was mostly outside of the maneuvering and violence that passes for politics in Afghanistan.
The main to beat: incumbent president, Hamid Karzai, on a poster with a security guard in the foreground. (Reuters) However, as U.S. bombs pounded Kandahar and Kabul in late 2001, in retaliation for the attacks of September 11, Karzai slipped over the border from Pakistan and promised to rally his fellow Pashtun tribal leaders against the tottering Taliban.
Instead, he had to be rescued by American Marines and ended up giving interviews to foreign television channels from a U.S. base in Pakistan.
But that misadventure didn't prevent him from ending up as the country's interim leader in 2002, a post from which he went on to win by a landslide in the first free elections for president in 2004.
His supporters say he turned the country around during his first term, helping promulgate a new constitution that enshrines the rule of law and many basic human rights.
Karzai also takes credit for pulling urban Afghans back from the abject poverty they suffered under Taliban and warlord rule in the 1990s.
With billions in foreign support, his government built schools, clinics and oversaw road construction on a grand scale. Women walked free in Kabul for the first time in more than a decade and millions of girls went to school.
The criticism
But detractors find much to dislike about Karzai's government and his personal style.
He has been criticized for making peace with the faction leaders from the civil war who wrecked their country by squabbling for power after Moscow pulled out in 1989.
A controversial law granting amnesty to human rights abusers has sat on his desk for two years, neither vetoed nor signed. (Some say that's why he retains the support of men like the Uzbek warlord, Abdul Rashid Dostam and his vice presidential candidate, Mohammed Fahim Khan, who have been accused of abuses by human rights groups.)
His backing of a contentious family law for Shias has also earned him the wrath of women's groups.
The Karzai administration has also done little to curb rampant corruption in the country, although it's probably fair to say Afghanistan's poverty and the cascades of foreign aid money that seem to be washed away are as much to do with financial malfeasance as the criminal tendencies of the president's courtiers.
A recent profile of Karzai in the New York Times described him as aloof, isolated in his highly secure presidential palace in Kabul, yet fond of theatrical gestures and convinced that the Afghan people wanted him to stay in power.
Opinion polls — widely seen as untrustworthy in Afghanistan — have given Karzai a strong lead over his nearest rivals, but not by enough to win outright, without a runoff against the second-place finisher.
His aristocratic Pashtun ancestry might be what saves his candidacy in the end, say most analysts. Afghanistan is a fledgling democracy at best and a president with strong family ties to the country's former monarchy might just be enough to win the day.
The main challenger: Abdullah Abdullah
The man most likely to force Hamid Karzai into a presidential run-off is an urbane 48-year ophthalmologist who goes by the somewhat unlikely name of Abdullah Abdullah.
Karzai's main challenger: former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah. (Reuters) In the 1990s, Abdullah was the spokesman for the legendary guerrilla leader, Ahmed Shah Masud. At the time, like many Afghans, he went by just one name, calling himself simply Abdullah.
Western journalists, unable to convince skeptical copy editors that this was the case, insisted that he give himself two names and he famously replied, "OK then, call me Abdullah Abdullah."
Masud's assassination by two Arab suicide bombers came just two days before al-Qaeda's audacious attacks on the U.S. in September 2001.
Horrified, Abdullah threw himself into nation-building as U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban regime in Kabul. He joined hands with Karzai and served as foreign minister in his first government.
The two parted ways in 2006 and Abdullah sought to turn his diplomatic skills and mixed Pashtun-Tajik heritage into political assets.
His campaign has generated far more interest and support than many had predicted and his support appears to have risen steadily since he began touring the country more than a month ago.
More parliamentary powers
Abdullah's platform calls for more powers for Parliament and direct elections for the country's 34 provincial governors and hundreds of district chiefs, which are currently appointed positions.
He also promises to bring peace by talking to moderate Taliban leaders but gives few details of how he'd do that.
Most analysts see his campaign's successes as a mark of the country's wariness with Karzai, as much as his own political strengths. If he does force a runoff, it still seems unlikely that he'd win. But Abdullah is young and extremely ambitious and has a future in Afghan politics for years to come.
The technocrat: Abdul Ghani
Best known outside of Afghanistan for co-authoring a book called Fixing Failed States, Abdul Ghani has had the chance to put his ideas in practice since returning to his homeland in 2002. First as a UN official, then as President Karzai's chief economic adviser and finance minister.
'Afghanistan doesn't do technocrats.' But if they did: Abdul Ghani. (Reuters) Ghani introduced a new currency, rebuilt financial institutions and even tried to get warlords to pay taxes on their contraband-fueled wealth.
Canadian officials say his clean image and relentless work ethic secured billions of dollars in aid money that might otherwise have gone elsewhere.
It's hard to find anyone who has a bad word to say about the 60-year-old former university professor from Berkeley and Johns Hopkins. But he has very little mass appeal.
As a Western diplomat, quoted by Reuters, put it, "Afghanistan doesn't do technocrats."
However, if he does well enough he may just get something like his old job back.
The dark horse: Ramazan Bashardost
A few months ago, very few Afghans or even foreigners who follow the country had heard of Ramazan Bashardost. Another former member of the Karzai cabinet, the 43-year-old lawyer has made a virtue of simplicity during his campaign.
Some call him Afghanistan's Barack Obama but he is probably more of a Gandhi: Ramazan Bashardost. (Reuters) Unlike other leading candidates, Bashardost travels by car or mini-bus, and moves through crowded bazaars without a phalanx of armed security guards.
"I've done nothing wrong, no one wants to kill me," he says, explaining his decidedly unsafe approach to campaigning in today's Afghanistan.
Citing Gandhi and a 1940s Pashtun pacifist and anti-colonial campaigner, Khan Ghaffar Khan, as his role models, Bashardost talks directly to Afghan voters about how he'd end the war in their country.
His simple style belies a deep political savvy, according to journalists who've covered his campaign.
After resigning from the cabinet in 2005, Bashardost won election to Parliament by a wide margin. He returns most of his $2,000 monthly salary to poor constituents and other needy Afghans.
The ethnic card
His main drawback isn't something he's able to change: his ethnicity.
Bashardost is a member of Afghanistan's Shia Muslim Hazara minority and that's considered a handicap in a country where most voters choose candidates from their own communities.
Being Shia in a devout, largely Sunni land doesn't help either. But Bashardost has made an impact on this campaign and his message of peace and simplicity do have an appeal in a country where narco-dollars and stolen development aid have many other politicians rich.
The Rest
There are at least 32 other candidates running for president of Afghanistan. The official list has 41 but many appear to have dropped out on their own.
Afghanistan's former attorney general, Abdul Jabbar Sabet, a former Montreal resident, calls himself an anti-corruption campaigner but he's also despised by many Afghan journalists for ordering a police raid on the country's most popular television station in 2007.
Several other former Karzai ministers are also in the campaign, along with prominent tribal leaders and returnees from the Afghan Disapora.
There are two female candidates for president: Frozan Fana and Shahala Atta are both members of Parliament and describe themselves as champions of gender rights in a deeply conservative, patriarchal society.
Media reports say each has to campaign amid heavy security because of threats from the Taliban and others who oppose a role for women in public life.
The issues
Hamid Karzai has seized the peace initiative by offering talks with moderate Taliban as his main campaign plank, although he's not been too specific about how he'd arrange the negotiations. His government has tried for several years to lure war-weary insurgents into talks but has largely failed to win over any significant Taliban leaders.
Abdullah, Ghani and other candidates also promise to find common ground with insurgents but give few details of their plans.
Corruption and controlling the influence of foreign aid donors also rank high with Afghan voters. Karzai is promising to hold NATO governments to account for both military and development operations, as is Abdullah.
Both men are appealing to Afghan nationalism and it's a message that has many takers. The problem may lie in the detail. Afghanistan is hardly ready to rely on its own military or economic output, making foreign support a fact of political life for years to come.
Mostly, Afghans appear to see this election as a test of their country's institutions and a referendum on the presidency of Hamid Karzai, says veteran Canadian journalist and author, Kathy Gannon.
She's convinced Karzai will win, if only because voters want what he promised them in 2004 but hasn't yet delivered: peace, jobs and an end to foreign military operations on their soil.
"Not much has changed under Karzai, and people are impatient, even angry with him," Gannon told CBCNews.ca from Kandahar, "but he'll win. He's Pashtun, he's from the right background and besides, people don't do protest votes here. They vote with their community, or their elders or their village. That's good for Karzai."
