“Do You Want the Whole Box for One Person?”

ABC News has a video of some scenes from last month’s Afghan parliamentary elections; it’s a bit different from those montages of purple-dyed fingers one often sees. There’s “a kind of assembly line of fraud,” in which several men pitch in to fake-and-fold ballots; a discussion of whether it’s worth throwing a few votes in the box for the other guy, for appearances’ sake (“Do you want the whole box for one person?”); and a woman with several identification cards, who explains that she’s getting twenty dollars a vote—she’s poor, and, in any case, “around here, nobody cares about the elections.”

That’s not quite true. Almost ten candidates ran for every seat; in many cases, what motivated them wasn’t ideology but the promise of graft. (In Afghanistan, buying votes counts as an investment.) So who won? The results were supposed to be announced yesterday, but that was postponed; the fraud was just too blatant, and a million votes, or more, will likely be thrown out—perhaps a quarter of the total. That makes counting tricky. According to what “Western officials” told the Times, the fraud

included ballot-box stuffing, citizens forced to cast their votes at gunpoint, corrupt election officials and security forces complicit with corrupt candidates.

“Cast their votes at gunpoint”—where did the candidates’ men get those guns? Were those “security forces” the same ones we’ve been funding and training?

Speaking of guns and money, there was also this in the Times over the weekend, on the unravelling of Iraq’s “Sunni Awakening,” and how it, too, may involve payments and jobs as much as, or more, than ideology:

The former insurgents were initially paid by the American military, with promises that they would eventually get jobs with the government.

But the Iraqi government hasn’t come through, and, according to the Times, Al Qaeda, in tandem with its threats of assassination, offers better pay. And so:

Although there are no firm figures, security and political officials say hundreds of the well-disciplined fighters—many of whom have gained extensive knowledge about the American military—appear to have rejoined Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

If you find that you’ve essentially paid someone to stop shooting at you, you ought to figure out how you’re going to use the interval before he asks again. That is important not only in terms of Iraq, but because of the way the surge has been used as a model for the current escalation in Afghanistan—the land of polling stations where the ballots all have one name.