A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  “Massive, unbridled, unsophisticated, blatant and untrammelled” was how Carney described the fraud in a Democracy International report eight months after the vote. Ten votes in the box became one hundred on the results sheet, the extra zero added later, in different handwriting. Losing candidates showed up in election offices carrying cardboard boxes full of shredded votes they’d purportedly been denied. At least fifteen candidates reported that election staff members at tally centers were requesting seven dollars per vote. “Top-off voting,” where election staffers marked the leftover ballots for their preferred candidates, was common. In the Panjshir Valley, candidates got identical results in three separate voting stations: 427, 427, 427 for one candidate and 10, 10, 10 for another. Supporters of both leading candidates took part. A week after the election, I went up to the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, an Abdullah stronghold, and talked to a depressed election official slumped in a jail cell, bruises on his face and blood speckling his scarf, who told me he’d been arrested and beaten after protesting that police were shutting down booths because people were voting for Karzai. “I am in pain,” he said.

  When asked about the voting fraud long afterward, Americans involved in the election said they believed that palace staffers, Karzai supporters, election officials, and police officers all helped orchestrate a Karzai victory. But they were less sure about whether Karzai ordered that to happen or even knew the details of the trickery. “Did Karzai call in his team and say, ‘Cheat your way into a first-round success?’ I don’t think so,” Eikenberry said. “Did Karzai design a team with an intent that was known, to do what has to be done? Absolutely.” Carney saw it the same way: “We have absolutely unimpeachable information that palace officials were deeply involved in ballot stuffing.” Karzai’s defense was to flail, accusing foreigners, including a European general, of a ridiculous plot of stuffing ballot boxes themselves.

  At markets in Kandahar, voter registration cards were being sold in bundles of three hundred. In station after station, hundreds of pages of identical ballots showed Karzai winning 100 percent of the vote. “The counting of the ballots was unobserved,” one U.S. military commander told me. U.S. military intelligence officers in Kandahar reported to their Kabul headquarters that there were more votes for President Karzai across the south than there were voters and that Ahmed Wali had had a “major hand in that.” Abdul Raziq, the young border police commander and Karzai ally, stored ballot boxes overnight inside his own home. In his domain, Karzai won 8,341 votes. Abdullah got 4.

  The other candidates had already dismissed the election as hopelessly flawed. The parliament member Mirwais Yasini called it the “end of democracy.” Abdullah Abdullah was holding press conferences in his garden nearly every day with new accusations of ballot-box stuffing.

  “They ripped ballots out and stuffed them in. You could see they just marked them all in the same hand. It was such an amateurish, idiotic attempt, so incredibly, childishly transparent” was how one Canadian adviser in Kandahar described it. A video aired on Afghan television showed men and women sitting on the floor calmly doctoring votes, folding and stamping ballots. One of them told the camera that “the same stuffing was taking place in all districts” and that it was “fun to do.”

  It took weeks before the scope of the fraud came clearly into view. On election night, the U.S. embassy cabled home that “no reliable early returns exist.” And yet by the next morning, Richard Holbrooke seemed to have come to his own conclusion about the results. Before heading to the palace to see Karzai, Holbrooke met with the U.N. envoy Kai Eide, along with Eikenberry and other members of the American election team. As Eide wrote in his memoir, “Holbrooke’s main point was that Karzai needed to be prevented from declaring victory. We should now insist on the need for a second round to clear the air after all the irregularities.” Eide wondered how they could ask Karzai to do this if the votes had not yet been counted, and he urged Holbrooke not to raise this with the president. “You have to understand,” Eide told him, “that Karzai sees you as someone who wants to get rid of him.”

  When Holbrooke arrived at the palace, he ignored that advice and made it clear that he felt that Karzai had not won more than 50 percent of the vote and that a runoff would be necessary. In Karzai’s recollection of that lunch meeting, Holbrooke told him that “the election must go to the second round.”

  “The vote had not even properly begun to be counted by then. Not even counted. Not even begun the counting,” Karzai told me. “I said we should wait for the results. He said, ‘No, the results are ready, we should go to the second round.’ ”

  Others present in the palace that day have similar memories of the exchange. The president’s spokesman, Waheed Omar, recalled Holbrooke telling Karzai that “there was a need for the second round. The president said, ‘How do you know? We barely voted. And the ballot boxes are not even in the provincial centers yet, most of them are still locked in the voting stations. How do you know it’s going to go to the second round?’ ” Holbrooke, as Omar remembered it, said the United States knew of election fraud that would make the vote illegitimate in the minds of the Afghan people and the international community. “In the president’s mind, the Americans did not want to replace him, they wanted to wound him, they wanted to delegitimize him in a way that he would not stand in their way as a strong president with opinions of his own, as a president who could drive his own agenda and push his agenda against that of the Americans,” Omar said. “That’s the way he took it.” Karzai told me the same thing. At that moment, he said, he knew the Americans “were working on trying to have an election in which, if they could not defeat me, they would leave me as illegitimate.”

  For their part, Karzai and his team were just as quick to jump to conclusions about the outcome. Within one day, his campaign manager was telling reporters that Karzai had won by more than 50 percent and a runoff would not be necessary; within four days, his finance minister announced that the president’s margin was 68 percent of the vote. But as more than three thousand complaints about fraud poured in from across the country, it became clear that a recount of some fashion would be necessary. The Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) went into triage mode, and decided that only the most blatant cases would be scrutinized. Weeks passed in arguments over what happened in far-off voting booths and how to arrive at some approximation of a true result. In those weeks, the fraud seemed to harden American officials’ feelings against Karzai. Palace officials hunkered down, insisting that everyone was out to wrest power from them.

  The country’s official arbiter of the voting, the Independent Election Commission, found that Karzai had won 54.6 percent of the vote, but the organization was widely believed to be biased in Karzai’s favor. American officials tended to trust the ECC, which would audit and recount the votes. It had a majority of foreign members and was led by a Canadian. The Americans saw the ECC as made up of objective, rigorous experts who hewed closely to the facts. The palace saw the ECC as more foreigners plotting against Karzai. This type of Afghan vs. foreigner division deepened the longer the confusion dragged on, particularly as Karzai’s camp made it clear that they might not accept the results of the recount if it pushed them below 50 percent.

  —

  When that came to pass—the ECC found that of the 3 million votes for Hamid Karzai, at least 800,000 were fraudulent and would be wiped away, costing him his majority—it set up a showdown over whether Karzai would accept the conclusions of his own government’s institutions, however imperfect, or throw out the rules and steer Afghanistan toward some place where the rules no longer applied.

  Karl Eikenberry had spent days insisting to angry Afghan officials that Holbrooke and the State Department had not rigged the recount to swipe a victory from Karzai, nor had they been planning for a runoff the whole time. Now he faced the task of convincing them, and Karzai, that they should accept that very fate. The White House sent Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee,
to help argue the point, instead of Holbrooke.

  Given how the first round had gone, American diplomats were in fact dreading an encore, risking soldiers’ lives and millions of dollars more to organize another potential sham vote. Eikenberry sensed reluctance from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when talking about it with her on the phone. But he saw this as a defining moment for the Afghan government. If they could accept the rulings made by their own institutions, even if politically painful for the incumbent, it would add ballast to the shaky young democracy and elevate Karzai, making it clear that he wasn’t just some third-world thug. It would show that Afghanistan could be the type of country that Eikenberry, and the rest of the Americans, hoped it could be.

  Karzai simply refused, convinced that he had won by a majority in the first round. In McChrystal’s memoir, he described Karzai’s attitude toward Eikenberry as “rage.” Karzai shouted, argued, rationalized, schemed. He warned that a second round would lead to brutal ethnic violence. To persuade him otherwise, Eikenberry knew, he needed Afghans to make the argument to Karzai; he would never listen to Americans.

  Eikenberry and the embassy political team fanned out to its various Afghan contacts: the governors, ministers, warlords, and technocrats, as well as the sympathetic diaspora Afghans with McMansions in suburban Virginia and the Islamist clerics who preached about the evils of American occupation in their Friday sermons. Eikenberry’s subordinates went out to meet with the old lions of Afghan politics, men whose lives were one long, bloody struggle for power—Mohammad Qasim Fahim, the vice president; Ismail Khan, the ruler, in effect, of western Afghanistan; Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, a former ally of Osama bin Laden’s—to try to convince them to accept the ruling of an electoral commission composed of a majority of foreigners: that enough votes for Karzai were fraudulent that he had not actually won a majority. If Karzai unilaterally declared himself the winner, Eikenberry believed, in addition to weakening Afghanistan it would energize all of Karzai’s enemies, from the opposition groups to the Taliban, and it would put his government in open opposition to the United States, just as tens of thousands more troops were on their way to fight on his behalf. They needed to find some way to make Karzai blink. The message from his diplomats in those meetings, as Eikenberry remembered it, was that Karzai “was driving toward a cliff. And he may run over that cliff. The question is, Are you going over the cliff with him? Or are you going to try to dissuade him?”

  One night, Eikenberry and his deputy, Frank Ricciardone, were invited by the minister of public health to meet in his office next to the embassy. Most of the employees had left for the day. They followed the minister down a darkened hall into a large conference room they had not visited before. Eikenberry was startled by what he saw. Around a vast table sat dozens of Pashtun government leaders and elders in turbans and robes, a group of men who formed the core of Karzai’s political support and afforded him his authority with their fellow tribesmen. At the head of the table, in a white turban and large square spectacles, sat Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, the ailing former president of Afghanistan, who had been Karzai’s boss when he was a lowly political water boy living in exile in Pakistan.

  Karzai’s whole public image had been crafted as an appeal for Afghans to transcend ethnicity. The brutality of the civil war that had followed the Soviet departure, with so much killing of Pashtuns, Hazaras, Tajiks, and Uzbeks, had been a black period for him; it was what had forced him to flee the country as a young man, what he would do anything as president to avoid. And yet many would argue over the years that Karzai saw himself, above all, as the leader of the Pashtuns. Of the two main branches of the Pashtuns, an ethnic group comprising tens of millions of people and hundreds of tribes that straddled both Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Karzais were Durranis, those who had founded modern Afghanistan and, since the eighteenth century, had often ruled it. Karzai’s father had been the leader of the Popalzai tribe until he was killed, in 1999, and then that mantle passed to Hamid. Hamid’s style of politics was often likened to that of a tribal leader rather than a modern bureaucrat: sitting with audiences of any social standing, hearing their grievances, seeking compromise, conciliation.

  American officials in Kabul, when frustrated or enraged at Karzai, which was often, would dismiss him as just another backward tribesman, “a spoiled Durrani princeling,” as one top U.S. political adviser described him. Leaders of the minority ethnic groups, like the Tajiks and Hazaras, would accuse Karzai of manipulating a pro-Pashtun agenda that slowly was stripping them of the power they had amassed early in the war. “At least in the deep recesses of his mind,” General Dan McNeill, the top military commander during two tours in Afghanistan, told me, “he considers himself the father figure of all Pashtuns, all Pashtuns, both sides of the border. Of that I’m absolutely convinced.”

  The assembly of Pashtun leaders facing Eikenberry, then, were as influential with and important to Karzai as any group of Afghans. And they felt as adamantly as Karzai did that he had won the election with a clear majority. They argued to Eikenberry that forcing a second round on the nation would mean more chaos and uncertainty; avoiding it would spare a lot of bloodshed.

  “Ambassador, you don’t have to do this,” one Pashtun minister told him. “You have options. This election can be decided in President Karzai’s favor.”

  Eikenberry had known many of these men for years. He’d walked bazaars and drunk lukewarm green teas with them. He’d listened to them drone on about the same tired slights: that America had abandoned them after the Soviets left, then given their country back only to ruin it with meddling. He was tired of and frustrated by their whining. He slammed his fist on the table.

  Do you think we have American soldiers here risking their lives to secure this election so that you can make a mockery of it?

  There was so much massive corruption, he said, so much flaunting of any sense of rules or fairness, that the country needed a second round. They needed to clean their hands of this farce. All of them, Eikenberry said, had lived through the civil war of the early 1990s, when tens of thousands died in the streets of Kabul, when ethnic groups slaughtered one another, when crossing town meant running a gauntlet of militia front lines of war-shattered rubble.

  “There were no rules. It was the jungle,” Eikenberry said. “Now you are returning to the jungle. What we are talking about is rules. The rules aren’t perfect. But if you don’t follow them, you’re going back to the jungle. This is your chance.”

  The meeting ended after two hours. It was late, and Eikenberry was exhausted. The room emptied out, and he rose to leave. Mojaddedi, the former president, a man Eikenberry knew well, raised a hand.

  “My son,” he said. “Come back.”

  It was just the two of them. Mojaddedi put his hand on Eikenberry’s knee. He said that because he represented the United States, he could have any outcome to this election he wanted. Eikenberry, with his earnest North Carolina–bred patriotism, really believed that representing the United States meant standing for certain values—in this case, respect for a fair democratic process. And he told Mojaddedi that.

  “So what you are saying is there has to be a second round?”

  “That is exactly what I’m saying.”

  Mojaddedi smiled. He patted Eikenberry’s knee.

  “Okay. There will be a second round.”

  When the Pashtuns met later at the palace with Karzai, their message was simple: you can either have the majority of the vote from the first round, or you can have the United States of America.

  —

  The palace press conference had been delayed for hours. The reporters, trapped inside the palace meeting hall, had been stripped of their cell phones. Outside, walking among the rose gardens, President Karzai and Senator John Kerry were nearing the end of their twenty-hour marathon negotiation, meant to be the culmination of the effort by Americans and Afghans alike to get Karzai to agree to the second round. It was two months after the vote had taken place. Karzai had finally a
greed, and the announcement was scheduled for one p.m. The press was called in. Ambassadors and other dignitaries went to the palace to be in attendance for the news. But Karzai was still resisting and was refusing to show up.

  As they walked around the grounds and visited the palace mosque, Karzai was still convinced that he had been cheated out of a legitimate win. Kerry felt that Karzai needed to put the interests of the country and its institutions in front of his own. Kerry, who’d lost to George W. Bush five years earlier, commiserated with Karzai about what political failure felt like. He told Karzai, as others had, that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the United States and Afghanistan to work together if he refused a new election. These types of veiled threats and ultimatums were coming in from many sides. The United Nations representative, Kai Eide, urged Karzai to accept a second round, saying that otherwise he would resign. “This was probably the most difficult conversation I experienced with Karzai,” he wrote later. “I was exhausted.”

  One of the things that most infuriated Karzai was enduring the public humiliation of having to submit to this foreign, and primarily American, arm-twisting. Having to concede that his votes had been rigged, that he was not the clear favorite of the Afghan people, was an epic loss of face. Karzai wanted some way to preserve his dignity and emerge from the election as a decisive winner. During their talks, Karzai asked Kerry for assurances that if he agreed to participate in a second election, it would actually take place. A decisive second-round win over Abdullah would vindicate him and legitimize the election. As his spokesman, Waheed Omar, remembered it, Karzai told Kerry: “Look, I’m going for the second round, I accept the second round, but can you guarantee that it will happen?” Kerry said, “I swear to the Bible and the Koran that there will be a second round.”