The October Surprise in this election — and it’ll be a surprise
only if you haven’t been paying attention — will be the pictures
flashed around the world of millions of people lining up to vote on
Saturday in Afghanistan’s first-ever presidential election.
True, Afghanistan still is a tough environment, tough enough so
that troops will be stationed to protect the polling sites. And no
doubt there will be violence by those who want to disrupt the
electoral process. But the big story will be that, despite the
threat, more than 10 million Afghanis who have registered to vote,
including at least 4 million women, will be going to the polls to
elect a president for the first time in their history.
The election won’t be perfect. Afghanistan won’t be perfect. But
it’ll be better, both for us and the Afghanis, than when that
country was the world headquarters for al Qaeda’s training
camps.
Hamid Karzai, whom the United States supports, is expected to
win in a landslide. Already, the critics are charging that Karzai
was “selected” by the United States, just as they say George W.
Bush is the “selected” president of the United States.
Nevertheless, it’s a hard sell to argue that things aren’t now
better in Afghanistan than when playing chess or flying a kite was
punished by jail time and the Taliban used the soccer stadium in
Kabul as the site for amputating hands and the public execution of
fornicators.
The election isn’t the last step in the process of establishing
a democratic government in Afghanistan. It’s only a beginning step
for a nation torn apart by decades of civil war and extremist rule
by the Taliban. And there’s no shortage of al Qaeda terrorists,
anti-democratic warlords, and Taliban fanatics who are determined
to derail the process. As a coalition, they seek nothing less than
the regeneration of a narco-terrorist state that can clamp a
fundamentalist straitjacket on the Afghani people and fund a
worldwide assault against the West.
Hanging chads, in short, won’t be the problem Saturday. We can
look ahead to car bombs and rocket attacks. Al Qaeda and the
Taliban, though displaced, are still a force, as are banditry and
warlordism. This year more than twice as many reconstruction
workers have been killed as in 2003. In the nine months it took to
register voters, 12 people have been murdered and 30 injured in
election-related terrorist attacks.
But no car bomb should eclipse the fact that what we’re seeing
is the turning of a nation. Since the defeat of the Taliban in the
fall of 2001, about 3.5 million Afghani refugees have returned to
Afghanistan, voting with their feet. On election day, millions more
who haven’t yet made it home will be voting by absentee ballot —
800,000 living in refugee camps in Iran, another 1.5 million in
Pakistan. By a million-to-one, the voters in Afghanistan will
outnumber those who get up that morning and strap dynamite sticks
to their exhaust pipes, or around the waists of their children.
None of what I’m saying is meant to suggest that things are
fundamentally okay in Afghanistan, or in Iraq. The assessment on
Afghanistan that Donald Rumsfeld gave to CNN’s Larry King in
December 2002, a year after the Taliban had been driven from power,
was plainly too upbeat. “There are people who are throwing hand
grenades and shooting off rockets and trying to kill people, but
there are people who are trying to kill people in New York or San
Francisco,” said Rumsfeld. “So it’s not going to be a perfectly
tidy place.”
No, Afghanistan is worse than San Francisco, worse than a bit
untidy. But it’s unquestionably not as bad as when it was the
training ground for the movement that attacked New York City on
Sept. 11, 2001. Instead, Afghanistan is now a line in the sand in
the global struggle between a murderous form of theocratic fascism
and the rest of the world, a major front in the battle against the
Taliban and al Qaeda murderers who seek to slaughter as many of us
as is necessary in order to purify the world in the name of Allah.
It’s a fight, if we’re to continue to exist, that we can’t afford
to lose.
