Afghanistan's Elections: The Road Ahead

Professor Stephen Biddle explains challenges Afghanistan faces as it selects a new president.

April 9, 2014

Afghanistan

By Julyssa Lopez

President Barack Obama congratulated Afghanistan on Saturday for what he called a “historic election” that will be critical to ensuring the country’s democratic future. Approximately 60 percent of Afghanistan’s eligible 12 million voters cast their ballots, despite Taliban intimidation and threats to upset polls. 

The election marked the country’s first successful attempt to select a new president since 2009 when efforts were heavily marred with fraud, political manipulation and violence. Afghans also administered the majority of their own security and ballot distribution this year. While voter turnout was higher than expected, the election process is far from over: Vote results won't be confirmed until roughly mid-May. Professor of Political Science and International Affairs Stephen Biddle explained that Afghanistan still has a long way to go before it successfully transitions power from President Karzai.

Q: How prevalent was the violence people feared from the Taliban on Saturday’s election?
A:There was substantially more violence Saturday than on an average day in Afghanistan, but a good deal less than what people feared—and less than there was surrounding the 2009 election.

The damage was heaviest in the east and south of the country, where the Taliban is able to contest government control. There are several different security-related issues involved here, both the targeting of active polling places and the deterrence that prevents polling places from opening at all. Most polls opened and functioned without incident, but a non-trivial minority could not because the local security environment was too dangerous.

Q: Which candidates are emerging as serious contenders for the presidency?
A: In the last couple of months, three of the eight announced candidates have emerged as the strongest. They’re a remarkably well-educated threesome: Two of them are medical doctors, and one has a Ph.D in anthropology.

Of them, Zalmai Rassoul is viewed as the establishment candidate. A Pashtun, he served as Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister until he resigned to run for president and is widely believed to be President Karzai’s preferred candidate.

Abdullah Abdullah, a half-Pashtun and half-Tajik ophthalmologist from the northern part of the country, has been a major opposition figure for some years now. He was the second place finisher in the 2009 elections behind President Karzai, and is widely viewed as the strongest candidate in the north and among non-Pashtuns. Like Dr. Rassoul, he is a former Afghan Foreign Minister, albeit less recently than Dr. Rassoul.

The third major candidate is Ashraf Ghani. Also a Pashtun, he earned a Ph.D in anthropology from Columbia University and has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and Johns Hopkins University. He held a position as a development economist at the World Bank, and has served as Afghanistan’s Finance Minister and the Chancellor of Kabul University.

All three are considered westward-leaning technocrats, and that’s a good thing—not all of the other eight candidates could be described that way. Initial results based on incomplete samples suggest that Dr. Abdullah and Dr. Ghani did significantly better than Dr. Rassoul.

Q: How is the relationship between the U.S. and Afghanistan likely to change if one of these three candidates is elected?
A: The relationship with President Karzai is completely broken, so the quality of the U.S. relationship can only improve. The question is how much and to what end.

Difficulties in the U.S.-Karzai relationship were partly because of maladroit handling from Washington, but also because of the problem of corruption in Afghanistan. That won’t go away just because of a new president. The same kinds of incentives that were working on President Karzai will work on his successor: He’s going to need support from powerbrokers around the country who control money, force and supporters. When the new president is seated, the network of patronage relationships that President Karzai used to govern the country will have to be renegotiated, and how that process unfolds will be important for U.S.-Afghan relations. Hopefully, the new president will restrain this kind of patronage and corruption relative to what President Karzai did. But Afghanistan is not going to become Switzerland just because the president changes.

Q: What other steps remain before a new president is successfully elected?
A: The votes must be counted, and the initial results have to be published. That won’t happen until mid-May at the earliest, and after that, there will probably be complaints about fraud that will have to be adjudicated. Assuming no one wins an outright majority, there will be a runoff between the top two finishers. That runoff is expected on or around June 20, but it could be delayed if there are disputes over the legality of the voting. Once somebody is finally elected, they have to form a government and name ministers. The earliest point at which we’ll know what the new government of Afghanistan looks like will thus probably be late summer, and it could easily be later.

Q: What is the attitude among Afghans? Are they feeling hopeful about the election?
A: When you look at things like turnout, an indicator of how much people think an election matters, it was significantly higher than expected—higher than in normal American elections. There have been a lot of signs that many Afghans are optimistic about the future. The underlying strategic fundamentals of the war, however, remain largely the same. The war is militarily stalemated, and that creates a whole series of dilemmas for its management moving forward. The voting itself went about as well as could reasonably be expected—but there are still a lot of things that have to happen before we can get an acceptable outcome to the conflict as a whole.