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Afghanistan: Creation of a Warlord Democracy

  

Chapter 1 - Warlords

 

 

 

The attack on the New York World Trade Center on September 11 2001 was followed by a US-led attack on the Afghan Taliban government: the Taliban were hosting Osama bin Laden, the leader of the Al-Qaeda network, allegedly behind the terrorist act. After the subsequent fall of the Taliban toward the end of 2001, two international actors became major power brokers in the country: the UN and the U.S. The UN led the state-building process in the country, while the U.S. mission officially remained limited to the Taliban and bin Laden.

 

The White House at first rejected NATO and UN offers to send peacekeepers in Afghanistan (Simonsen 2004:723) . Instead, the US military bought precarious and, more than often, double alliances with local military commanders, providing them with funds and weapons. The absence of international security providers opened a vacuum of power, which the Afghan warlords utilized to penetrate the new state offices. The warlords needed to gain political legitimacy in the newly built state, to legalize their armed forces, and to obtain legal impunity for the war crimes committed during the previous civil war (1970s-1990s). The first post-conflict elections in the country provided them with the opportunity to consolidate in power.

Much of the world media attention was directed to the Afghan Presidential and Parliamentary Elections in 2004 and 2005. These events were to be indicators of success of the democratization of Afghanistan and, consequently, justification for the military intervention by the U.S. The Elections took place in a relatively non-violent atmosphere, and were proclaimed a victory for the Afghan people and for democracy worldwide.

 

Despite the impressive achievement of having the Presidential and Parliamentary Elections take place at all in this continuously volatile region, an Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights Commission post-elections survey (AIHRC 2005) voices popular anger amongst Afghan citizens against warlords and militia commanders in the new political decision-making body of the country. The AIHRC survey pictures the elected Afghan Parliament dominated by warlords, commanders, their proxies, and various authority figures linked to them.

 

Who and what are the Afghan warlords? How did popular elections produce a warlord Parliament? This chapter will offer a definition of warlords and a typology based on warlords’ distinguishing features. The history of formation and consolidation of warlordism in Afghanistan will be given, starting from the Cold War to the contemporary period.

We shall find the following: warlords at present act as military security guarantors, cooperating with the two main international actors in the country, the U.S. and the UN. Warlords, although acting as security guarantors, use violence to increase insecurity and thus increase the demand for their services. Violence, or the threat of it, was used to shape the results of the Afghan Elections 2004 and 2005. The result was the creation of a legitimate and dysfunctional warlord democracy.

 

1.1. Defining Warlords

 

 The term “warlord,” although frequent in use, lacks a precise definition in political science, mainly due to warlords’ largely informal modes of operation. The word is used to refer to a wide range of meanings: from traditional local headmen, legitimate in their respective communities, to regional militant leaders of private armed forces, drug barons, war criminals and mass-abusers of human rights. The Western popular perception connotes this word with generally negative associations. However, this is an all-too-quick evaluation of authority figures that may be perceived as ethnic representatives and defenders within their own communities. I will henceforth use the term “warlord” as a value-neutral term, to refer to authoritative militants who fulfil a range of societal roles within the local communities, and who develop specific modes of economic, military and political operations and exchange under extreme circumstances.

 

The existent definitions of warlords typically describe a symptomatic blending of economic and military terms, which refers to warlords as to service-providers incorporated in the local and global economic system. Thomas Gallant’s notion of warlords as “military entrepreneurs” conceives a category of societal entrepreneurs, whose main commodity is violence: “By ‘military entrepreneur’ I refer to a category of men who take up arms and who wield violence or the threat of violence as their stock in trade. I use ‘military’ here not in its contemporary common connotation of a national army, but in an older, more ambiguous form referring only to the use of arms and weapons. They are entrepreneurs in the sense that they are purveyors of a commodity – violence,” (Gallant 1999:26-27).

 

I expand Gallant’s notion of violent commodity, emphasizing that it is used as a trump in each societal contract, with the fundamental function to divide the discourse of interaction into two zones: one of security, and the other one of threat. Ultimately, these zones can correspond to a zone of survival, and a zone of death, each one for rental.

 

1.1.1. Afghan Warlords

 

An Afghan officer of the international NGO Human Rights Watch describes the local use of the term warlord:

 

“Warlord is not a technical word. In Afghanistan, it is a literal translation of the local phrase ‘jang salar,’ and it has simply come to refer to any leader of men under arms. The country has thousands of such men, some deriving their power from a single roadblock, others controlling a town or small area, and still others reigning over large districts. At the apex of this chaotic system are some six or seven major warlords, each with a significant geographic, ethnic, and political base of support,” (Human Rights Watch: “Losing the Peace in Afghanistan,” 2004b).

 

However, we shall see in the next section that warlords and armed leaders do not make a homogeneous group. Militant entrepreneurship elicits features, motives, behaviour and interrelations different from those specific to local commanders.

 

The following chart presents the key power figures of Afghanistan and their areas of influence:

Figure 1 – Afghanistan’s power brokers. Source: Barnett R. Rubin, “Briefing on Afghanistan – AFNORTH” (2003b):31

1.1.2. Categories of Warlords

 

I shall propose here categorisation of Afghan warlords based on several features that connect and distinguish warlords from other types of military commanders and traditional headmen.

 

1. they command private, or privatized , military forces;
2. their rule is connected to a specific territory, usually to their ethnic community;
3. they posses some legitimacy among the local population;
4. they have a more or less symbiotic economic and military relationship with at least a part of the local community;
5. they participate in the global economic system, engaging in one or more forms of illicit or informal economy; and
6. they challenge, privatize or supplement the state functions, resources and instruments on their territories.

 

Warlords, among themselves, may differ in several dimensions:

 

1. type and size of military forces in formal or informal allegiance to them;
2. type of legitimacy among the local community: based on security-provision, economic welfare, tribe, ethnicity, tradition, religion, etc.;
3. sources of economic sustainability: ranging from black and grey economy, to legal entrepreneurship (from extortion, abduction, plunder, to extraction, security provision, licit activities, etc.);
4. type and degree of economic relationships with the local supporting community: ranging from social services and redistribution of resources, to extortion, coercion, abuses, mass displacements and mass murders;
5. extension of their cooperative networks and links to other global networks: ranging from local to international level, and
6. relationship with the government: ranging from cooption, cooperation, competition and tolerance of independent equals, to criminalization, persecution and extinction. The hostile relationship can go both ways: the state forces can criminalize and be criminalized by the warlords, in areas where different laws and authorities of the state and the local culture overlap and compete with each other.

 

None of the listed features are mutually exclusive. Each combination of relationships, in any degree, is possible and observable in Afghan reality. Moreover, these relational constellations are continually shifting, in type and in intensity, so that permanent categorization of individual warlords within static types will not show fruitful.

 

1.1.3. Warlordism

 

“Warlordism” describes a state of predominance of one or more militant entrepreneurs over internationally recognized territories (one or several states), embedded in the system of economic transactions, parallel to, challenging, cooperating with, or participating in the formal state government and the legal economy of the country.

 

Warlords, as military entrepreneurs - purveyors of the violent stock in trade, commonly are danger to and guarantors of security. As security-guarantors, they often supplement state functions. The government itself may be warlord-ruled. In other scenarios, the government may be weaker than the warlords, and may operate as long as it serves warlords’ purposes. Due to their territory-based legitimacy, warlords may tend to tolerate each other’s existence, so long as their informal territories are unchallenged, and so long as struggle for central state control is outside their interest or power. The latter is the case of Afghanistan and is the ground for the development of present warlordism.

 

1.2. History of Warlordism in Afghanistan

 

The history of Afghanistan describes a permanently weak state which has never ruled its territories and the population outside the regional capitals. All attempts to modernize the country have failed due to violent upheavals of the rooted traditionalism of the independent rural areas. Afghan warlords have been present on the country’s political scene for decades, as major military actors during the Cold War period and the subsequent civil war. The next section will describe the rise of warlords and their consolidation within the new state system.

 

 

 

1.2.1. The Rise of Warlordism in the Cold War

 

Militancy in Afghanistan rose from a particular traditional societal system of self-organization, violence management, provision of order, conflict resolution, and boundary maintenance in Afghan communities, fully described in chapter 4. The violence in the country was socially regulated and in state of dynamic balance between actors until the Cold War, when foreign military aid started pouring in, arming whole populations. In this period, modern technology of mass destruction was provided by the USSR and the U.S. to selected Afghan leaders and factions, which were then unleashed against each other’s ethnic communities. With the introduction and unequal dissemination of advanced military technology, the balance of violence was disrupted and mass killings began.

 

This went on through more than two decades long civil war. During the process, the former political elite, the urban culture, was extinguished or exiled. The final blow to the urban elite, as well as to the traditionally ruling families and clans, were the Taliban, suspicious of any sort of critical or cosmopolitan culture. Consequently, not many people were left available to form a political elite after the fall of the Taliban, when the democratization process was initiated by the UN. It was the warlords then who could guarantee security to the state, or sabotage it.

 

1.2.2. The Role of Warlords in the Fall of the Taliban

 

The events of September 11 were followed by the formation of the Western military coalition, formally comprised of the U.S., the U.K., Canada and Australia (under the name of Coalition Forces – CFs), in the U.S.-led mission “Operation Enduring Freedom” in Afghanistan. However, it was mainly with U.S. air forces and the Afghan Northern Alliance (NA) ground troops that the fall of the Taliban was achieved. The Northern Alliance was formed by warlords connected by nothing else but a common enemy, the Talib forces, which had previously fought them to the north of Afghanistan.

During this attack of foreseeable end, the UN organized a meeting of key Afghan and international players in Bonn, to determine the future of the country. Anti-Talib warlords were present at the Bonn Conference in 2001 which set the foundations of the future state. Warlords were given the status of legitimate representatives of the local “resistance” forces and military allies of the U.S.-led “liberation” war. The meeting produced the Bonn Agreement 2001, a document which ensured political power and recognition of the NA warlords, the democratization of the state, and appointed the U.S.-backed Pashtoon, Hamid Karzai, as an interim president.

 

1.2.3. Post-Taliban Phase

 

After the Taliban began their withdrawal to the Pakistani border, the Northern Alliance warlords, in coordination with the U.S. military command, advanced to Kabul and took over the control of the city (with exceeding number of civilian victims), expecting a share in the honour and in the spoils of war. However, the U.S. refused to further negotiate political issues with the warlords, treating them as hired military allies against the Taliban, and limiting the U.S. political involvement to financial and political support to their appointed interim president.  

 

The U.S. post-conflict plan was to continue the conflict, with CFs military presence limited to the capital and the Southern and Southeast Taliban regions of the country. Their comparatively minor military presence, never having exceeded 20.000 in number over 5 years, reliance on a compliant government, and no engagement in peace-keeping or state-building, opened a power vacuum where the remaining Afghan warlords consolidated their own local rules.

 

U.S. state-building in Afghanistan was limited to a symbolic reconstruction by combined military-civilian deployments. For two years, until 2003, the White House Administration was declining offers from the UN to send peacekeepers in the country or to expand NATO’s ISAF forces outside Kabul. With this, civilian security and political processes were impeded and endangered, and the UN-led state-building and democratization programmes were to a large degree subordinated to the U.S. national military objectives. The U.S. forces, with their significantly smaller deployment of UK allies, remained within their own mission (Bush 2003) – to hunt down Osama bin Laden. The least cost of achieving their aim seemed to be letting local warlords provide (or withhold) security by their own means, so long as the stated goal of the “Operation Enduring Freedom” was unimpeded. This mission has not been unaccomplished yet.

 

1.2.4. Establishment of Warlordism

 

The U.S. policy of laissez-faire and the absence of international peace-keepers in the country allowed warlords to strengthen their positions and seek recognition and rewards of legitimate victors. The NA warlords established themselves in government; some incorporated their troops and supporters within the new army, police and state administration, and expanded their (both licit and formal, and illicit and informal) economic, military and political networks throughout the country. The continuing violence scattered throughout the country and the abusive behaviour of the U.S. forces (HRW 2004c) , enabled warlords to offer themselves as legitimate security providers to their ethnic communities.

 

How did the process of warlord integration within the state take place? The case of Marshal Fahim, a NA Tajik warlord, presents a good example. Despite the Bonn Agreement, which disallowed any armed troops in Kabul other than the planned International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) , Fahim moved his forces into the capital in December 2001. He was appointed Defence Minister under the Interim Administration, and was thus enabled to integrate his combatants, estimated about 18 000, into the new Afghan National Army (ANA). Fahim soon appointed 38 generals from his loyal commanders in the ANA. In this way, the new army was originally built from combatants loyal to a single warlord, with a record of war crimes and with dubious loyalty to the idea of pacification and democratic state-building. It was a similar process with the Afghan Police (ANP), formed by legitimating Wardak’s loyal forces during Qanuni’s appointment as Minister of Interior. Thus, warlords-led combatants gained state uniforms, state salaries and relative impunity from past, present and future abuse of force. Other warlords achieved similar integration in the regions outside Kabul.

 

Human Rights Watch (2003a; 2003b; 2004a ) has documented a number of human rights abuses performed by the Afghan army and police troops since the beginning of the state-building process: kidnapping, extortion, illicit breaking into households, robbery, rapes of women and boys, harassment of political activists and media people. International and local calls for justice against warlords have been increasing in number. The history of each predominant warlord has been recorded in a number of documents. In January 2005, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights presented a historical overview of warlords’ human rights abuses to the Afghan President Karzai. The report was never released to the public. According to Ahmed Rashid, a human right advocate, political analyst and present member of the Presidential cabinet, “it created panic among the warlords and drug barons, who urged Karzai to shelve it.”

 

1.2.5. International Contractors

 

In international military and political contracts, Afghan warlords as military entrepreneurs at present have two main demand-sources: (a) the international community engaged in state building, democratization and pacification, and (b) the U.S., engaged in the continuing hunt for Osama bin Laden. The first actor is attempting to pacify violence, to rent peace in exchange for political power, while the second actor continues to rent local violent services in pursuit of the U.S. military goals.

 

Obviously, these two parties have different agendas for the warlords. In lack of coordination between the policies of the international engagement in Afghanistan, the warlords are able to maximize their gains by renting security services to both actors: simultaneously acting as providers of security for the international state-building community, and as providers of directed violence for the U.S. forces. So long as there is pending violence in the country, warlords’ services remain in high demand.

 

1.2.6. Grievances

 

No phenomenon can exist on its own, isolated from its environment. In order for warlords to exist, we have to trace the environmental needs they respond to. So long as these needs exist, the existence of the warlords can be expected.

 

A survey done by the Asia Foundation (2004) depicts the popular perception of the needs of the country in the following ratio:

Figure 2 – Perception of Security. Source: Asia Foundation (2004)

 

The highest items in demand are security (34%) and economy (27%), the two areas where militant entrepreneurs position themselves as main providers. Next we shall concentrate on the first item, on what (in)security in Afghanistan means, while chapter 3 will explain the second item, mechanisms of popular economic benefits of warlord rule.

 

Typically, security incidents in these past five years have not been predominantly caused by the Taliban, as the international media, NATO troops and governmental officers frequently present. Local population refers to warlords, and not to the Taliban, as the main threat to their security (HRW 2003a, Part III). The situation in Afghanistan at present is characterized by numerous minor security incidents scattered irregularly throughout the country. In most cases, incidents are officially ascribed to the Taliban, the common demonized enemy. When the Taliban are named, further police investigation is not necessarily carried out: the Taliban are treated in the ANA and CFs area of responsibility. Most often, perpetrators are either not sought or random imprisonment takes place.

 

The mechanism of informal violence usually functions as follows: warlords outsource violence to commanders or to individuals; local commanders, on their own or in coordination with a warlord, outsource violence to combatants or civilians. Low-intensity incidents follow, of minor scope and effect. The underlying function of these minor security incidents (typically road-side bombs, rocket-propelled grenades, and assassinations) is characteristically with the aim to achieve a deal with the government (such as release of prisoners, or approval to keep weapons), or to discredit a district or provincial governmental appointee (to show, for example, that he is not capable of controlling his territory), or to create critical demand for a capable security provider, (most often, the individual who outsourced the security incident in the first place). In brief, who can provide maximum violence equals the one who can provide maximum security. Here we see violence as a trump in local political arrangements.

 

Violence, or the threat of it, was used in the electoral political arrangements too. Well established in the state administration, warlords and their proxies extended the internal competition from military to political goals. The democratic institution of elections was subjected to violent competition as well.

1.3. Elections

 

The world media was presented with impressive numbers of registered voters, voter turnout and women’s participation in the Afghan Presidential and Parliamentary Elections 2004 and 2005. However, the warlords’ military predominance, expanded through the state administrative network, enabled militant figures to form the majority of candidates in the elections and to manipulate the electoral outcomes. In a highly volatile environment, there was barely anyone else to run for office or had the courage to compete with warlords. Also, the influence of the White House on the Afghan government most likely included licit and illicit support to Karzai’s presidential campaign, which probably determined the outcome of the Afghanistan’s Presidential Elections 2004. The following sections will describe the mechanisms used to manipulate the Afghan Elections and thus establish a warlord democracy.

 

1.3.1. Presidential Election 2004

 

1.3.1.1. Electoral data

 

For the UN-administered Presidential Elections 2004, significant majority of 10.5 million voters, out of the roughly estimated 28 million population, registered in the country and in the neighbouring Iran and Pakistan where several millions Afghan refugees resided. According to the JEMB Presidential Elections Results report (2004), the turnout at the Election Day, 9 September 2004, was estimated at 70%, just over 8.1 million voters, an impressive number for the first election after the Taliban rule, under conditions of aggravating security challenges. Women’s turnout accounted for unexpected 40% of the voters.

 

18 candidates were on the presidential ballot. Despite warnings by international organizations, warlords dominated the ballot. Voting proved to be mainly along ethnic, territorial and military lines. However, Karzai won 56 percent of the vote, followed by leading strongmen: Qanuni (16%), Mohaqiq (12%), and Dostum (10%). Obviously, the U.S.-backed Interim and Transitional President, and not the warlords, carried off the victory of the day.

 

 

 

 

1.3.1.2. Electoral violations

 

The following violations allegedly took place during registration: multiple voter registration cards, proxy-registration, and registration of deceased and non-existent individuals; forceful appropriation or buying off registration cards on behalf of candidates, registrant coercion and intimidation, purposeful overestimation of eligible voter’s numbers in some provinces, and underage registrants (also, see ICG 2004:4).

 

NGO observers (ANFREL 2004, AIHRC 2004, FCCS 2004, and FEFA 2004 ) listed the following electoral violations during polling: voter intimidation and harassment, presence of candidates, agents, armed persons and campaigning materials inside and close to polling centres, collaboration between electoral personnel and candidates, and washable “indelible” ink. Offences and offenders pointed to practically each candidate. In some cases, especially in Pashtoon-dominated areas, the high female voter turnout was explained as proxy-voting by male relatives.

 

During the counting period, reports included a number of cases of ballot boxes with broken seals, missing ballot boxes, missing ballots, and staffed ballot boxes with consistent voting pattern for specific candidates. Electoral offences again pointed out to practically all presidential candidates, including Karzai. However, as a first electoral exercise of the Afghan people, the Election was recognized as valid, despite its numerous shortcomings.

 

The picture below (Fig. 3) was taken on the Afghan Presidential Election Day, September 9 2004. The location of the photo is the district of Kharwar, in the south of the province of Logar, Central Region – Kabul. This district is known as Taliban-friendly area, providing safe passage, safe haven and support to combatants, on one of the main routes from the south and the southeast of the country to Kabul.

 

In the picture, a polling station is depicted. The person looking in the camera is the district governor. The person who took the picture was an Afghan electoral officer and a deputy head of the district shura . The purpose of taking this picture was to fulfil one of the duties of the electoral officers, that is, to provide more vivid illustrations of this historical moment. None of the people around this photo regard the secrecy of the ballot as an inviolable right of the voter. Obviously, the ANP officer, the person on the left, the governor, and perhaps the photographer, can see the ballot.

Figure 3 – Afghan Presidential Elections: secrecy of the ballot. Source: UNAMA field materials.

 

This photo can be taken as material evidence that the decision who to vote for was made by the local shuras, in accordance with the communal Afghan culture, and not individually and in secrecy, in accordance to Western individualistic models. Moreover, this district’s shura was one of the last to agree to participation in the election, and to “guarantee security” of electoral officers on their territory. The information gained from the field was that the shura accepted the electoral process after unnamed Karzai’s envoys or supporters negotiated with (or made large payments to) the shura their support. The polling results of the Logar Province were predominantly in favour of Karzai.

 

1.3.1.3. Undercurrents

 

A special feature of the Presidential Elections was the gradual acceptance of the electoral process among the traditional local councils (shuras) and the precariously positioned commanders. Local authority figures, previously stating indifference or hostility toward the elections, rapidly changed to support of the electoral process during the summer of 2004. This could not have been attributed merely to the official civic education campaign run by the UN. Multiple unofficial and independent sources confirmed a pattern of large scale payments, handed to voters, community leaders and commanders, to ensure support for various candidates. Allegedly, there were multiple payments for electoral loyalty offered by many and accepted by many, where the highest bidder apparently won. The elected President Karzai was backed by the U.S. It is necessary to indicate the influence of U.S. governmental and non-governmental agencies on the electoral process.

 

The fact that Karzai had no politically experienced or organized opposition without political programs, led some observers to name the Presidential Elections as something close to a farce (FCCS 2004) set to ensure Karzai’s election. However, the high voter turnout showed that regardless of the tradition of payment in the Afghan culture of exchange, it was the choice of the majority to accept democratic institutions as an extended part of the societal competition and cooperation for self-governance, even though the means applied were somewhat uncommon.

 

1.3.2. Parliamentary Elections 2005

 

The full Parliamentary Elections should have consisted of three parallel electoral processes: votes should have been cast for representatives to the Parliament, the Provincial Councils and the District Councils. Due to the still disputed district boundaries, the district representative election was not held. The 2005 Elections aimed at the formation of the Lower House and the Provincial Councils, the latter delegating a single representative from each province to form one third of the Upper House of Parliament. The second third of the Upper House is to be elected from the District Councils in the District Elections 2006, and the last third is appointed by the President.

 

1.3.2.1. Electoral Data

 

According to the JEMB Voter Registration Update Period: End-of-Period Report (2005:3), about 1.7 million Afghans registered to obtain new cards (90%) or make corrections (10%) of the personal data on the cards from the previous year.

 

However, despite the high number of registrants, the turnout for the Parliamentary Elections was surprisingly low: only 51.5% of the total number (calculated by number of issued registration cards) of registered voters, according to the JEMB Final Report: National Assembly and Provincial Council Elections (2005:6). The lowest turnout was recorded in the urban centres, especially in Kabul (21%) and throughout the Southern Region of Kandahar. The counting process was led by stricter rules than those in the Presidential Elections. The same JEMB Report (2005:6) says that ballots from 703 polling stations and additional 74 ballot boxes (over 2.5% of the total number of polling stations) have been excluded from the count by clear evidence of fraud, showing a consistent pattern of violation of the electoral regulations.

 

We have two contradictory indications: first, the high interest of many actors to manipulate the electoral outcome; second, the drop in voter turnout in comparison to the turnout on the Presidential Elections.  An internal survey conducted by the UN electoral staff on the reasons for the low voter turnout on the Parliamentary Elections concluded that it was largely due to the predominance of warlords on the ballots. Warlord candidates were the reason for these two contradictory indications: the high interest in the electoral outcome and the low interest to vote.

 

1.3.2.2. Candidates

 

According to the JEMB Candidate Nomination: Wolesi Jirga and Provincial Council Elections 2005 Report, a total of 6.102 candidates submitted applications to run for an office in the Lower House (Wolesi Jirga) or in the Provincial Councils in 2005. Kolhatkar and Ingalls (2005) delineated three main groups running for the parliamentary elections: a) Karzai and his allied group of technocrats, mostly returnees with international education and experience; b) the warlord group of Qanuni, Dostum, and Mohaqiq, and c) a group of intellectuals, critics of both Karzai and the warlords. The AIHCR-UNAMA Joint Verification of Political Rights report (2005:3) estimates that “approximately 16% of the 6.102 candidates have in the past served as commanders or maintained links with armed groups and approximately 4% of this group could pose a significant threat to their communities in the absence of disarmament.” The same report indicates that a quantitative analysis does not present an accurate picture of the overwhelming influence of several monumental figures among the ”dangerous” ones. These are the ones popularly referred to as “warlords.”

 

1.3.2.3. Candidacy Violations

 

The established independent Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) was in charge of sieving off ineligible candidates. Its functionality was undermined by a loophole in the Constitution and the Electoral Law, which bans convicted war criminals and persons with proven links to illegal armed groups from running for an office. In absence of a well-developed legal system, evidence and courage to challenge the standing militants, the ECC was faced with, in legal terms, mere allegations and not with convictions for war crimes, illegal possession of arms and human rights violations. In order to avoid the ban on candidacy, some ineligible candidates had relatives (in one case, a wife) run for the Elections in their stead.

 

According to the ECC, a total of 1,136 complaints against 556 candidates were filed with the election complaints commission. Only 208 candidates allegedly involved in illegal armed groups were officially under ECC scrutiny. The vetting process by ECC disqualified merely 17 candidates, according to the ECC Challenge Period Statistics (2005): 11 for “commanding or belonging to an unofficial military force or armed group,” 1 “not resigned from specified public office,” and 5 for “insufficient valid signatures in support of nomination.”

The UNDP Afghanistan New Beginnings Program (ANBP) maintains an expansive commander database, which contains about 1,800 names. Overlapping patterns of information from multiple and independent sources have put forward allegations against these persons for maintaining private militias. Most persons on this database are "benign," according to the head of the ANBP Program (North 2005) , with less than 100 actually dangerous groups. However, according to the same source, all 208 candidates from the ECC list are on the database and include “some key individuals.”

 

The UN-led efforts to persuade candidates to disarm had to be satisfied in the end, due to “political reasons,” with the armed leaders’ symbolic gestures. Sources involved in these disarmament negotiations with the suspected candidates alleged that the quantities of weapons handed to the negotiating teams were minute, and often consisted of inoperable and outdated weapons. The same sources confirm that this “political decision” has been advocated by unspecified Afghan governmental authorities. The official AIHRC-UNAMA Joint Verification Report (2005c) conveys disappointment in the vetting process: "Many expressed the view that a number of armed and powerful figures never appeared on the list [of ineligible candidates] due to political calculations."

 

How actively some candidates were interested in shaping the electoral result is illustrated by the 250 official “voluntary” withdrawals from candidacy, according to JEMB/ECC reports. At least six candidates were killed prior to the Elections; a larger number were a target of less successful assassination attempts; some, especially women, were threatened and physically intimidated to withdraw. The infamous so-called “Assassination” Article 37 of the Electoral Law made it highly desirable to kill better-faring candidates in order to succeed them in the aftermath of the Elections. The UN security reports found that most of the incidents related to candidates were due to inter-candidate conflicts, typically but for the most part falsely blamed on the Taleban, where violence was seen as means of eliminating competition.

 

1.3.2.4. Electoral Violations

 

Reported electoral violations, as recorded by the AIHRC-UNAMA Reports on the Joint Verification of Political Rights (2005b; 2005c) , included: candidate (and their relatives) harassment and arbitrary imprisonment by governmental officials, killing of religious. leaders supportive to the elections, voter intimidation by party agents and by JEMB polling staff, unauthorized “help” to voters inside polling stations for “illiterate” voters, women and youngsters, candidates campaigning inside polling centres, multiple voting, proxy-voting, underage voting, broken seals of ballot boxes, etc. However, all offences were in the limits of tolerable in the particular conditions in the country, the fraudulent votes were dealt with during the counting process, and the elections were proclaimed successful.

 

1.3.3. Post-electoral development

 

The predominance of warlords in Parliament became immediately apparent wit the first set of functions allotted to parliamentary members: Qanuni (the Northern Alliance warlords’ frontman) was elected president of the Lower House, with only a few votes of difference from another militant, Sayyaf Mojadidi (former president of the first mujahedeen government from the 1990s) was elected to head the Upper House. After the Parliamentary Elections, the President appointed only half (one sixth of the Parliament in total) of the parliamentarians he was supposed to appoint to the Upper House’s last third in order to balance the appointed with the elected power in the legislative body. The President’s list of appointees includes at least one famous. warlord, Marshal Mohammad Qasim Fahim, according to the JEMB “Presidential Appointees List” (2005) .The Parliament mirrors the power competitions of the country.

 

We now have a clearer picture of Afghan warlords as militant entrepreneurs, positioned in relation to the security situation in the country. The history of warlords’ ascension to high governmental posts is obviously linked to internationally-influenced local conflicts, which enforces the positions of Afghan militant entrepreneurs in the post-Taliban political sphere. The first Afghan elections were the means of establishing warlords in the newly-built democratic regime.

 

 

 

 

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