The Orbis

Despite the boastful, facetious and arrogant words of our incompetent president and administration, the recent presidential election in Afghanistan proved no more than an embarrassing national calamity. Because of the extremely expedited registration and planning process, the nation’s maiden election was besieged by an abundance of fraud and technical errors.

Albeit the impressive voter turnout in Kabul and other major cities, the proliferation of counterfeit voting cards and the incredible ease of eliminating the professed indelible ink simply debunks the emerging election results.

After a two-week recount, the election results currently positions Hamid Karzai, with 55 percent of the popular vote, ahead of his tenacious opponent Yunus Qanuni, and remain under heavy scrutiny. Understandably so, all of Karzai’s opponents have denounced the first vote as illegitimate, and thus triggered an international credibility crisis for the U.S.-appointed President Karzai as well as the international occupation of Afghanistan.

Perhaps the first indication of the imminent fraud proved the consuming dust storm that preceded the Afghan elections; some Afghans even suggested it as a symbolic harbinger to their daunting repressive government that simply would takeover their old.

Moreover, as a direct result of the inferior quality of the supposedly “indelible” ink used to mark thumbs to prevent repeat voting, many Afghanis simply washed away this incredibly transient “fraud-protector” and voted multiple times.

An Afghan soldier with the responsibility of guarding the presidential palace admitted, “I voted three times." Even more terrifying, a female election observer told reporters, “I saw a man vote six times, I swear.” Additionally, several Western journalists covering the Afghan presidential election reported their drivers voted three and four times.

The regulation of the voting process also proved disastrous, for when news of the vanishing ink spread, some polls closed hurriedly and then reopened hours later. During this anarchistic chaos, other polls ran out of ballots while others had no pens for marking the ballots and some simply ran out of space in ballot boxes.

Could this situation have possibly been more corrupt or ridiculous? Impossible you say? Guess again, for numerous reports of allegations of intimidation spewed from the entire country. One presidential candidate even claimed that his observers saw the police in Kabul telling people to vote for the U.S.-backed Karzai.

How can this rampant behavior ever be accepted as true democracy?

The newly and obviously rashly constructed Afghan system, which the Bush administration has expressed intentions of using as a model, clearly failed to serve and represent its now frustrated citizens.

Meanwhile, in the White House Bush and his manipulative cronies applaud the U.S.-led Orwellian efforts to democratize the Middle East and establish another puppet government for the United States’s immediate disposal.

Bush had the audacity to comment on the extremely superficial splendor of this already corruption-ridden Afghan “democracy” in a statement earlier this week, “Amazing, isn’t it? Freedom is beautiful.”

The world and, most importantly, Afghanistan will not have officially ascertained their first president until the three-member U.N. team investigating complaints publicizes its report later this October.

This administration's evident nation-building mindset is truly problematic to the, now rather forgotten, and seemingly umatainable notion of world peace. If the Bush administration manages to finagle itself back into power, then we must, alas, prepare ourselves for four more arduous years of this distressing democratization of the Middle East and other under-developed nations. The only hope for the world remains a dramatic change in leadership this Nov., and quite advantageously, we find ourselves with the capacity to implement this most needed transition of power.

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