Afghanistan Isn’t Ready to Vote

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Bloomberg, 20 October 2013

Sarah Chayes, in an op-ed for the news agency, recalls witnessing ballot stuffing in Kandahar province in 2009, looks at the “lessons unlearned” from this experince and reviews Afghanistan’s electoral institutions. She points out rightly that Americans – and not only Americans – “now typically view elections abroad as a positive, with little reference to context”. She cites Martine van Bijlert’s AAN dossier about Afghan elections:

“Afghanistan’s government ‘has no centre of gravity,’ as one insightful analyst put it. ‘Authorities are ill-defined. There is no clear mechanism for arbitration,”’no power that convincingly has the final say.”