The Afghan presidential candidate, Abdullah Abdullah, has recently announced his decision to pull out of the second round of Afghanistan’s presidential elections. The first round of the elections was dogged by ubiquitous corruption and vote rigging in the incumbent, Hamid Karzai’s favour, but still failed to produce a conclusive and legitimate victory for Karzai because the extent of corruption was discovered. A second round was demanded, but Karzai refused to replace the so called independent election officials used previously, thereby rendering a repeat election rather pointless, since those who greased the wheels of corruption last time would still be there, oil in hand, at all the places which matter most for conducting a fair election.

So Abdullah has backed down, leaving Britain and America in an awkward position indeed. Now Karzai will become president by default, no longer restrained by the democratic processes that the occupying Western forces are so desperate to impose. The British prime minister, Gordon Brown, claims that Abdullah has stepped down in the interest of ‘national unity’ – a nice and benign sounding phrase for which Brown must be commended. But hang on one darn-tooting, democracy-pushing minute – a ‘national unity’ gained from the absence of credible opposition to a fraudulently elected government? That sounds a little undemocratic doesn’t it? Not according to Hillary Clinton it doesn’t: ‘I don’t think it has anything to do with the legitimacy of the election’, the US Secretary of State said, ‘It’s a personal choice [of Abdullah Abdullah’s to pull out]’. Yes, I suppose it was a ‘personal choice’ of Abdullah’s who, when faced with the overwhelming corruption of Karzai’s regime and the incompetence of Western forces in guaranteeing a fair election, chose to bow out of an unwinnable run-off campaign, thereby stripping Karzai’s government of any remnants of democratic credibility and exposing the election for the farce that it is. 

It’s at times like these that I feel sorry for politicians. The governments of Britain and America have essentially been presented with an unambiguous failure, one for which much blood has been spilled and many billions of dollars spent. The entire purported reason for the occupation of Afghanistan has just been rubbished, and yet the rules of politics dictate that nothing can ever be admitted to be a total washout, and thus redeeming features have to be found. In this case, the redeeming feature is the fact that the turmoil of the democratic process has ended, and the violence and dissimulation that had emerged as a consequence of the election and its contestation could potentially be at an end. But the fundamental issue here is that in attempting to sugar coat the failure of the democratic process in Afghanistan, politicians have had to present the absence of the essential ingredient of democracy – political opposition within the election process – as the means to achieving ‘national unity’ in Afghanistan. What has been implied here is that the democratic project cannot produce stability in the Middle East but that a dictatorship with a translucent veneer of democracy can.