The elections for the president of Afghanistan have ended. Maybe. If you’ve been following this news at all, you know that incumbent President Hamid Karzai was fighting for re-election (not counting miniature and vain candidates) against three other men.
The Taliban said they would disrupt the proceedings, and in the areas they control, it appears they have. The country’s overall turnout of about 33 million was estimated at about 30 percent of registered voters, who number about 17 million.
In a country where the median age is just over 17, this might be a decent number considering the minimum voting age is 18 and life expectancy is around 45.
Published voting times are from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. To escalate turnout, the government issued an order to keep polling stations open for an extra hour, although not all polling stations in Mazar-i-Shareef (pronounced mah-ZAHR-ee Shar-EEF) received the news.
My colleagues and I visited about 20 polling stations in this northern city yesterday, and since we only saw a handful of polling stations in one city in Afghanistan, I hesitate to extrapolate these few data points into any coherent statement, although as I write this at 4:30 on a Friday morning local time. I see others don’t have the same problems. President Obama has already declared this process a success.
Some anecdotes: Voting is divided by gender, mainly to prevent men from influencing women. As men, we were told that we were not allowed to enter places where women were voting. This was of course wrong.
Of the eight polling stations that I personally visited during the day, in three of them a woman was responsible for the entire campaign – men’s AND women’s sections.
Each registered voter received a laminated card containing personal information and a photo. Since it’s Afghanistan, many women didn’t want her face shown, so the space was empty. If so, she had to tell the electoral commission employee (also a woman) her name, husband’s name and father’s name – all of this is on the card.
At one stop a woman entered, completely covered and unable to answer questions. She was taken out, but returned a few minutes later and was allowed to vote.
Thanks to our translator, we learned that when she saw the three men standing at the polling station, she became so nervous that she did not remember the answer.
The Heisenberg Principle even works in northern Afghanistan.
Once voters entered, they showed their card to be marked with a straightforward punch. However, the “hole punches” did not work, so poll workers either cut out an approximation of the triangle with a knife or, more commonly, simply cut off a corner of the card.
At one point we asked the woman in charge how the punching system worked. She said with a twinkle in her shocking blue eyes, “Accidentally, our hole punch works.”
Of course, I couldn’t be in a place like Afghanistan for most of a week without a moment of MULLINGS.
One day we had lunch at the local military base, which is mostly populated by German soldiers. It’s an ISAF base, which stands for “International Security Assistance Force,” although in the shadowy humor that soldiers everywhere are likely to adopt, I came across a mocking ISAF badge in the PX with the subtitle: I Saw Americans Fighting.
Anyway, we sat in the dining room surrounded by about 800 German soldiers and started talking about where we went for our undergraduate studies, for example (to pick one out of slender air) Marietta College, Marietta, Ohio 45750.
One of us said he went to Middlebury College in Vermont and ran the College Republican club there. Some of us giggled, and to others I explained quite innocently: Middlebury? They are so far to the left that they think liberals are… Nazis.
In fact, I don’t think any of the Germans heard me, but there was a miniature group of US Air Force members sitting at a nearby table, so I slipped in and visited with them while my colleagues secretly but quickly retreated.
One more report from abroad and then home.
