A member of the Election Complaints Commission,
announced the disqualification of 21 candidates
in Afghanistan. (NYT)
announced the disqualification of 21 candidates
in Afghanistan. (NYT)
Kabul:
On the audiotape, two men are heard speaking in Dari, with the distinct accent of the western city of Herat, as they negotiate terms for rigging more than a dozen races in Afghan's parliamentary elections.
One of the men, according to the country's Independent Election Commission, is Abdul Rashid Irshad, a low-level functionary in the commission's Kabul headquarters. On the tape, Mr. Irshad sounds by turns wheedling, whining, self-pitying and cynical.
The other man's voice is well known to millions of Afghans as that of Ismail Khan, the old warlord who long controlled Herat as his personal fief and is now a member of President Hamid Karzai's cabinet. He comes across as solicitous, patronizing and ingratiating -- a big man dealing with a little man who claims to have control over something he wants: the ability to turn a half-dozen winning parliamentary candidates into losers, and losers who were favorites of Mr. Khan into winners.
"When you talk you seem worried," Mr. Khan says. "I am afraid you will ruin things."
"To be honest, your excellency," Mr. Irshad replies, "we have to be worried because we are under pressure here."
In an election so riddled with fraud that 1.3 million votes -- about a quarter of the total -- have been thrown out, the two men's scheme was just a minor fraud. But it speaks volumes about the pervasiveness of the corruption surrounding Afghanistan's elections -- and about how little that corruption benefited the powerful, in part because of aggressive policing of the Sept. 18 voting and its aftermath by the Independent Election Commission and the Election Complaints Commission.
On Sunday, the complaints commission gave its final ruling on more than 2,000 charges, disqualifying 21 more candidates on the grounds of election fraud; 4 others were disqualified earlier.
Sunday's action will allow the election commission to certify the vote's results, which is expected later this week.
Thirteen of the final 21 disqualified candidates are supporters of President Karzai. They include a cousin, Hashmat Karzai; the brothers of several high-ranking presidential appointees; and seven members of the last Parliament. "It's dramatic," said an election commissioner, Zekrai Barakzay. "It certainly shows that the I.E.C. is independent and the ECC is independent, and their decision is final."
A spokesman for President Karzai, Waheed Omer, declined to comment. Hashmat Karzai said the complaint commission's action was "motivated by politics and political rivalries."
Despite his supporters' fervent efforts, President Karzai seems likely to end up with a Parliament that has an even smaller minority of members loyal to him than he and other political observers had expected.
The widespread fraud that helped him win his presidential election last year backfired this year. Even his fellow Pashtuns will be underrepresented because so many Pashtun candidates have been thrown out.
Nowhere, it seems, did fraud backfire so dramatically as it did in Mr. Khan's efforts to play the kingmaker he once was.
An investigation is continuing into the origins of the audiotape, which consists of two damning telephone conversations totaling 43 minutes on successive days between Mr. Khan and Mr. Irshad.
An acquaintance of an Afghan employee of The New York Times offered to sell a copy of the tape to The Times, but the newspaper has a policy against paying news sources. The Times later obtained a copy without payment from a parliamentary candidate from Herat who suspected Mr. Khan of rigging the election results against him.
Mr. Khan's spokesman, Mohammad Aman Shaikh ul-Islami, said that Mr. Khan had never spoken to anyone from the election commission on the phone, and that a computer must have been used to fabricate the tape from innocuous cellphone conversations, or that someone was imitating Mr. Khan's voice.
Mr. Irshad was a temporary worker in the election commission's public outreach department who "had no access to the database of votes," said one election official, speaking anonymously because of the continuing investigation into the tape. "He was a nobody."
For a nobody, Mr. Irshad had Mr. Khan's rapt, if often frustrated, attention.
The taped conversations suggest that Mr. Khan had been delighted to find a willing insider in Mr. Irshad, but that he came to feel Mr. Irshad was increasingly demanding and difficult -- even incompetent. Mr. Irshad can be heard telling Mr. Khan that because he feared being searched going into the election commission offices, he lost the piece of paper on which he had written down the names of those candidates Mr. Khan wanted to win and those he wanted to lose.
"We are in charge of the database, and they don't even trust us," he complains indignantly and without a trace of irony.
He worries about his health, about getting caught, about God's disapproval.
"Wouldn't I be a sinner if I do this work?" he asks, to which Mr. Khan laughingly replies, "Believe me, if you do this work, pretend you went to Mecca."
"OK, then," Mr. Irshad says. "I will do this, but after that you have to send me on hajj to make sure God forgives me."
Mr. Khan is so respectful and solicitous toward Mr. Irshad that the axiom comes to mind that even when you pay bribes to officials, you must still at least pretend to pay them respect.
It is not clear how much Mr. Khan was paying Mr. Irshad, but apparently the amount was substantial. When he tells him to make sure a female candidate loses, Mr. Irshad sighs and says lightly, "There goes $20,000," seemingly a reference to a bribe that the woman had given him to guarantee that she won. Mr. Khan told Mr. Irshad he wanted a member of Parliament from Herat, Aziz Ahmad Nadem, to lose.
In an interview, Mr. Nadem said that he was initially mystified when the election commission disallowed 6,000 votes he had received, but that "after the release of the tape, we saw why: the exclusion of our votes was engineered very smartly and accurately by Mr. Khan and his pawn at the I.E.C."
However, if Mr. Khan had bribed Mr. Irshad to, in effect, make Mr. Nadem go away, he wasted his money. Not only did Mr. Nadem win his seat, on Sunday, he was one of the 21 candidates disqualified by the Election Complaints Commission -- for some unspecified fraud of his own.
One of the men, according to the country's Independent Election Commission, is Abdul Rashid Irshad, a low-level functionary in the commission's Kabul headquarters. On the tape, Mr. Irshad sounds by turns wheedling, whining, self-pitying and cynical.
The other man's voice is well known to millions of Afghans as that of Ismail Khan, the old warlord who long controlled Herat as his personal fief and is now a member of President Hamid Karzai's cabinet. He comes across as solicitous, patronizing and ingratiating -- a big man dealing with a little man who claims to have control over something he wants: the ability to turn a half-dozen winning parliamentary candidates into losers, and losers who were favorites of Mr. Khan into winners.
"When you talk you seem worried," Mr. Khan says. "I am afraid you will ruin things."
"To be honest, your excellency," Mr. Irshad replies, "we have to be worried because we are under pressure here."
In an election so riddled with fraud that 1.3 million votes -- about a quarter of the total -- have been thrown out, the two men's scheme was just a minor fraud. But it speaks volumes about the pervasiveness of the corruption surrounding Afghanistan's elections -- and about how little that corruption benefited the powerful, in part because of aggressive policing of the Sept. 18 voting and its aftermath by the Independent Election Commission and the Election Complaints Commission.
On Sunday, the complaints commission gave its final ruling on more than 2,000 charges, disqualifying 21 more candidates on the grounds of election fraud; 4 others were disqualified earlier.
Sunday's action will allow the election commission to certify the vote's results, which is expected later this week.
Thirteen of the final 21 disqualified candidates are supporters of President Karzai. They include a cousin, Hashmat Karzai; the brothers of several high-ranking presidential appointees; and seven members of the last Parliament. "It's dramatic," said an election commissioner, Zekrai Barakzay. "It certainly shows that the I.E.C. is independent and the ECC is independent, and their decision is final."
A spokesman for President Karzai, Waheed Omer, declined to comment. Hashmat Karzai said the complaint commission's action was "motivated by politics and political rivalries."
Despite his supporters' fervent efforts, President Karzai seems likely to end up with a Parliament that has an even smaller minority of members loyal to him than he and other political observers had expected.
The widespread fraud that helped him win his presidential election last year backfired this year. Even his fellow Pashtuns will be underrepresented because so many Pashtun candidates have been thrown out.
Nowhere, it seems, did fraud backfire so dramatically as it did in Mr. Khan's efforts to play the kingmaker he once was.
An investigation is continuing into the origins of the audiotape, which consists of two damning telephone conversations totaling 43 minutes on successive days between Mr. Khan and Mr. Irshad.
An acquaintance of an Afghan employee of The New York Times offered to sell a copy of the tape to The Times, but the newspaper has a policy against paying news sources. The Times later obtained a copy without payment from a parliamentary candidate from Herat who suspected Mr. Khan of rigging the election results against him.
Mr. Khan's spokesman, Mohammad Aman Shaikh ul-Islami, said that Mr. Khan had never spoken to anyone from the election commission on the phone, and that a computer must have been used to fabricate the tape from innocuous cellphone conversations, or that someone was imitating Mr. Khan's voice.
Mr. Irshad was a temporary worker in the election commission's public outreach department who "had no access to the database of votes," said one election official, speaking anonymously because of the continuing investigation into the tape. "He was a nobody."
For a nobody, Mr. Irshad had Mr. Khan's rapt, if often frustrated, attention.
The taped conversations suggest that Mr. Khan had been delighted to find a willing insider in Mr. Irshad, but that he came to feel Mr. Irshad was increasingly demanding and difficult -- even incompetent. Mr. Irshad can be heard telling Mr. Khan that because he feared being searched going into the election commission offices, he lost the piece of paper on which he had written down the names of those candidates Mr. Khan wanted to win and those he wanted to lose.
"We are in charge of the database, and they don't even trust us," he complains indignantly and without a trace of irony.
He worries about his health, about getting caught, about God's disapproval.
"Wouldn't I be a sinner if I do this work?" he asks, to which Mr. Khan laughingly replies, "Believe me, if you do this work, pretend you went to Mecca."
"OK, then," Mr. Irshad says. "I will do this, but after that you have to send me on hajj to make sure God forgives me."
Mr. Khan is so respectful and solicitous toward Mr. Irshad that the axiom comes to mind that even when you pay bribes to officials, you must still at least pretend to pay them respect.
It is not clear how much Mr. Khan was paying Mr. Irshad, but apparently the amount was substantial. When he tells him to make sure a female candidate loses, Mr. Irshad sighs and says lightly, "There goes $20,000," seemingly a reference to a bribe that the woman had given him to guarantee that she won. Mr. Khan told Mr. Irshad he wanted a member of Parliament from Herat, Aziz Ahmad Nadem, to lose.
In an interview, Mr. Nadem said that he was initially mystified when the election commission disallowed 6,000 votes he had received, but that "after the release of the tape, we saw why: the exclusion of our votes was engineered very smartly and accurately by Mr. Khan and his pawn at the I.E.C."
However, if Mr. Khan had bribed Mr. Irshad to, in effect, make Mr. Nadem go away, he wasted his money. Not only did Mr. Nadem win his seat, on Sunday, he was one of the 21 candidates disqualified by the Election Complaints Commission -- for some unspecified fraud of his own.
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