[Since the current campaign began in January, insurgents have
vowed to disrupt it. So far, they have not attacked any of the 11 presidential
candidates, who are heavily guarded. Instead, they have carried out a series of
attacks on foreigners, mostly considered soft targets, as well as two
high-profile attacks on election-related facilities: the one Saturday on the
election commission, and another on a commission
branch office in Kabul on Tuesday, which killed five Afghans.]
By Rod Nordland and Matthew
Rosenberg
 |
Afghan security forces blocked a
street leading to election commission offices attacked
Saturday. Credit Bryan
Denton for The New York Times
|
KABUL,
Afghanistan — Usually, an Afghan election — a $100 million, Western-funded
exercise — draws foreigners to Kabul like flies to honey, with incoming flights
full of consultants, international monitors, diplomats and journalists.
Not this time. Now, it is the flights out that are full, and the
incoming planes are half empty. With the possible exception of journalists,
foreigners have been leaving Afghanistan like never before during an election
period after a series of attacks on foreign targets and the commission running
the vote.
An attack on the offices of the Independent Election Commission went on
all Saturday afternoon, with staff members hiding in armored bunkers and safe
rooms while five insurgents fired rockets and small arms at the commission’s
compound, having sneaked into a building nearby disguised in burqas.
There were no reported casualties among the election staff, but
flights to Kabul were diverted because the airport was shut down for most of
the afternoon, said the airport’s director, Mohammad Yaqoub Rasooli.
Even before the attack on Saturday, many international election
monitors had either drastically curtailed their activities or made plans to
evacuate their foreign employees, potentially raising serious questions about
the validity of the election.
The National
Democratic Institute, a mainstay of previous Afghan elections,
closed its Kabul office and sent its international monitors home after one was
killed in a recent
attack on the Serena Hotel, where the monitors were staying, said
Kathy Gest, the institute’s spokeswoman.
The International
Republican Institute, which has helped monitor previous Afghan
elections, has not been involved in this one.
Ahmad Nader Nadery, chairman of the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan,
said that another major monitor, Democracy International, had decided to cease
its activities altogether. But a Democracy International official said the
group had merely reduced its presence because of security concerns.
“The report that we are pulling out our staff and are not
observing the election is inaccurate,” said the official, Jed Ober, director of
programs. “We currently have a core team of six experts managing a team of 12
long-term observers.”
Mr. Nadery said: “Leaving the country at this critical moment
causes two problems. A lot of the election bodies and monitors will be denied
their expertise, and it will affect the credibility of the elections. With
their not being on the ground, they cannot make observations or judgments about
the credibility of the process.”
Elections that are relatively free and fair have been a minimum
requirement for international donors, and many countries have made it clear
that without them, they will not continue sending aid to Afghanistan at current
levels. The 2009 presidential vote was widely
viewed as flawed, even with the presence of many international
monitors.
Since the current campaign began in January, insurgents have
vowed to disrupt it. So far, they have not attacked any of the 11 presidential
candidates, who are heavily guarded. Instead, they have carried out a series of
attacks on foreigners, mostly considered soft targets, as well as two
high-profile attacks on election-related facilities: the one Saturday on the
election commission, and another on a commission
branch office in Kabul on Tuesday, which killed five Afghans.
The commission’s main compound “is in total lockdown, and we
have moved our staff to bunkers and safe houses,” a spokesman, Noor Ahmad Noor,
said on Saturday. “None of the insurgents have managed to breach our security and
enter.” Early reports said that two police officers had been wounded and that
the five attackers had been killed.
United Nations officials said they planned to keep a full
complement of election experts and technicians in Afghanistan, though many
other United Nations operations here are “basically skeleton agencies now,” one
official said.
For weeks, the United Nations has been encouraging staff members
to take early vacations or leaves during the election period. But that advice
became more urgent after the wave of violence, which included the deaths of 21
people, including United Nations employees, in an
attack on a restaurant; the assassination of a Swedish
journalist; the Serena attack; and, most recently, an attack
apparently aimed at Christian
missionaries in Kabul.
The United Nations officials who have stayed are under such
severe security restrictions that it is unclear how meaningful their assistance
will be.
“They’re really not able to do their jobs,” said one United
Nations official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to
speak to reporters. Referring to the United Nations Development Program, he
added: “Even the U.N.D.P. international staff who used to be at the I.E.C.,
they’ve been pulled out of that building more than a month ago. So they don’t
have the same sort of daily face-to-face engagement in Kabul, because you just
can’t get out.”
The departure of foreigners is affecting not only election
monitoring, but also other activities. The country’s only five-star hotel, the
Serena, was booked solid before the attack but is now nearly half empty, a
reservation clerk said. The American University of Afghanistan suspended
classes during the campaign and encouraged faculty members to use the time to
travel abroad, according to its president, C. Michael Smith, who said that
advice had been influenced by “increased security concerns in the run-up to the
elections.”
But Mr. Smith said that worries about the violence had so far
prompted only one foreign faculty member to quit, and that no students had
pulled out. “It is a challenging environment, but we also have a very dedicated
faculty,” he said.
Over all, though, safety concerns are making people change
plans. “Foreigners are really leaving the country recently,” said Zemarai
Kamgar, the president of Kam Air, an Afghan airline. Lately, he said, it has
been rare to see more than one or two passengers on domestic flights, which
previously accounted for one-tenth of passengers.
There have even been fewer journalists than usual covering the
campaign and other events, and some freelance translators have complained about
the scarcity of work.
One political analyst, Mohammad Younas Fakoor, said he believed
that the insurgents had decided to drive foreigners from Afghanistan to
discredit the election process.
“The presence of foreign observers plays an important part in
avoiding election fraud,” Mr. Fakoor said. “When none are present, the
candidates will obviously use their power to scheme and defraud, and try to
steal more votes. Then they’ll accuse one another of fraud.”
The United Nations official expressed a similar concern. “We
could see a dirty election, or one that lacks credibility, or it’ll be both
dirty and lack credibility,” he said. “I don’t know how it can be otherwise.”
Haris Kakar, Ahmad Shakib and Jawad
Sukhanyar contributed reporting.
