Afghan vote audit begins but failure risks losing US support
Collapse of election process could bring an abrupt end to US financial and military support if one of two rival candidates steps away from deal
John Kerry spent hours listening to the rivals' grievances before gently pushing them towards the ambitious agreement. Photograph: Rahmat Gul/AP
Afghanistan has staved off a slide into violence with an unprecedented deal to recount every single vote cast in the contested presidential election, but as the audit begins there are fears the process is still fragile and some big problems have only been kicked down the road.
The counting of 8.1m votes, according to the independent election commission, will take at least three weeks, as hundreds of auditors sift through papers cast for either
Ashraf Ghani, a former World Bank technocrat, or Abdullah Abdullah, a former mujahideen adviser.
They will work under the watchful eye of candidate agents, local election monitors and as a key guarantee of neutrality, European Union observers.
One of the candidates does not trust the election authorities organising the recount, the other does not trust the police and army securing it, and both are wary that fraud by the other side will be ignored while possible cheating by their own supporters is scrutinised.
Ghani was ahead by over 1m votes in preliminary results,
but Abdullah says that 2m of his opponent's ballots are fraudulent.
"They may try to reopen the package, and if they do, it's over," a diplomat in Kabul warned. "Either they would walk together through the process or they stop it, then all options are open and they will lose US support."
The last-minute deal brokered by the US secretary of state,
John Kerry, gives the eventual loser a plum position as a kind of chief executive for the government, and ultimately prime minister if a constitutional change can be pushed through. It creates in one swoop a new centre of power in a government until now dominated by an immensely powerful president.
The system shaped by Washington over a decade ago kept parliament intentionally weak because of worries about ethnic factionalism, and a feeble, corrupt judiciary offered no other check on presidential authority.
Relinquishing some of those sweeping presidential powers after a hard fought campaign will be painful, and the deal is only as binding as the political will that shaped it.
With Iraq disintegrating, both Afghans and those in Washington have a painful reminder of the risk of failure.
The US has been unequivocal that a collapse of the election process would bring an abrupt end to financial and military support for a country that cannot yet pay its own bills.
And because the extent of the fraud is genuinely unknown, both rivals come to the audit table as potential losers, offering a large incentive to make that position as attractive as possible if the audit is thorough.
"They are mutually reinforcing, the technical and the unity government deals. Without both, you don't get a deal," the diplomat said. "They may withdraw once or twice, but they both have a stake."
An added incentive may be the tantalising promise of a historical legacy, as the leader who created a more stable system, one that can keep ethnic tensions in check, prevent a repeat of this year's slow-motion debacle, and avoid the need for US and UN help next time round.
"Its embarrassing that we could not resolve this ourselves," said one government official. Outgoing president
Hamid Karzai who fought hard to banish any foreign influence on the vote,
called the deal a "bitter pill" swallowed for the sake of his country. However, it was still welcomed by many of the ordinary voters who had started to wonder if their enthusiasm for democracy had been naïve. "With a 100% audit, people will believe in the election again," said another senior Afghan official. "Now they know that every vote does matter."
There was also relief that a looming crisis, with real potential for violence, had been averted. Abdullah's supporters were talking publicly about civil unrest, and behind the scenes
already weighing up odds on a coup, the New York Times reported. Abdullah himself was vulnerable in the face of fury from his most powerful backers, whom he struggled to restrain.
"It was serious enough that it engaged the president of the
United States and the secretary of state and that's not an everyday occurrence," the US ambassador, James Cunningham, said of the crisis.
"At the worst there was a real danger this process could get out of control, at best the talk that was going on and rumours that were circulating on both sides were highly undesirable and in and of themselves becoming corrosive to the prospects of reconciling the political discussion."
Kerry spent patient hours listening to the two sides lay out their grievances in fine detail, and gently pushing them again and again towards the unexpected and ambitious agreement.
There has never before been such a thorough audit of a national vote, and the scale of the undertaking will push Afghanistan close to unofficial international deadlines for selecting a new leader.
At the ambitious rate of checking 1,000 ballot boxes a day, it will still not be finished until mid-August, and that relies on a very speedy recruitment of observers by the European Union, which is taking an unusually prominent role to pre-empt accusations of American meddling.
A summit in China at the end of August, and a Nato meeting in the UK in early September should set the country's future direction at least for the next two years, and help seal critical funding for a government that cannot pay even half its own bills.
Neither can be moved, but talks between the two candidates about the details of their government are already under way. If they can keep them civil and productive, and if the audit is smooth and credible, diplomats and officials say they are hoping the new leader will be sworn into office around 23 August, with a team ready to start work almost straight away.
