Afghan Elections

[Tamim]

You have a valid point.... but in bloodbaths leaders don't die, ordinary civilians and supporters do. What is the guarantee that if Ghani steps down his supporters would not be upset by the gesture and have confrontations with Abdullahs supporters? how would that ensure that a bloodbath would not happen?

So far we have seen a calm and collected Ghani team. Ghani simply needs to address his supporters and tell them not to cause social disorder and appeal to the tribal elders.

Or, he can appeal to the elections process and say that after the recount he legitimately lost. A white lie.

[Khostai]

I think that Dr Ghani should walk away from this contest with dignity while he is ahead. He is an educated man. He should not fight for power. He should let the others fight for it. If he stays in this struggle, they will make a jahil out of him. It would be a waste of his years of education.

Even if Dr Ghani walks away, there are still many Pashtun who will be ready to fill in the void. The Abdullah camp have a lot of Pashtun, including Abdullah himself.

Ashraf Ghani has lost this battle. If he becomes the President, the country will be flipped upside down.

Why should Ghani walk away? Its will be really irresponsible of him when millions of Afghans risked there lives to vote for him and now he will just walk away? And to whome will he let Afghanistan? To a criminal gang who the past 13 year looted almost every dollar that came in...

And by the way the Pashtuns in abdullah team are big thiefs and looser themselfs, they can be hardly called human let alone Pashtun becuase they already have sold there souls for money.

Even tough under Ghani Afghanistan will hardly be a sovereign country, US will still play major roll in it, because lets be honest which country is free from US? Even the developed Europe is in theire hands, but at least in his hands ordinary Afghans can have it easy and build up a normal society where they can work, live and have a good live with job apportunity and peace. This is the only reason I am pro Ghani, becuase I really think he can make the best out of this hole situation, and Afghan people suffered the most in the past 30 years, they need education good houses and living standarts.
Abdullah on the other hand will fill in his pockets and do nothing and you will get the same situation as it is in Iraq now, the splitting up and civil war.

[Tamim]

Why should Ghani walk away? Its will be really irresponsible of him when millions of Afghans risked there lives to vote for him and now he will just walk away? And to whome will he let Afghanistan? To a criminal gang who the past 13 year looted almost every dollar that came in...

And by the way the Pashtuns in abdullah team are big thiefs and looser themselfs, they can be hardly called human let alone Pashtun becuase they already have sold there souls for money.

Even tough under Ghani Afghanistan will hardly be a sovereign country, US will still play major roll in it, because lets be honest which country is free from US? Even the developed Europe is in theire hands, but at least in his hands ordinary Afghans can have it easy and build up a normal society where they can work, live and have a good live with job apportunity and peace. This is the only reason I am pro Ghani, becuase I really think he can make the best out of this hole situation, and Afghan people suffered the most in the past 30 years, they need education good houses and living standarts.
Abdullah on the other hand will fill in his pockets and do nothing and you will get the same situation as it is in Iraq now, the splitting up and civil war.

Your guess is as good as mine as to who can better lead the nation.

In fact, even a child can guess and be right on at this point. Dr Abdullah has turned out to be a playground bully that even the teachers are afraid to reprimand because they don't know what he is capable of doing next.

Hence, that is why I said, just let Abdullah have his way.

Maybe Abdullah is bluffing, but who is gonna call his bluff?

[dehqaanherawi]

The only people who want power are the warlords. They have influence. So, the way the democratic process works is that you need to have a majority. So, naturally, you will need to get all the influential people on your side.

Dr Ghani made a big mistake by wanting to run for power. To be honest, I don't like his style. However, I am appealing to his education to force him to step down, and not fight for power in order to maintain stability. He should ignore whoever is pushing him.

You need warlords and Karzais support. Without him Ghani would never win. He cheated and now he demands respect.

Funniest thing is that most of those "warlords" are considered as "elders" by most of afghans. I dislike pretty much Ismael Khan but I would not dare to say it to most of my fellow herati brothers.

[Tamim]

I feel really sad that our country and our people have not learnt from its recent past and long history.

Until when are going to ask outsiders to help us? It is these outsiders who have put us in this situation.

Until we decide we would want to built our own country, we will always be at the mercy of outsiders because they are keeping us afloat by aiding us monetarily, either by providing cash to the government or by building our infrastructure.

With Kerry in Afghanistan there is hope. But, I feel so cheap as an Afghan.

We are beggars.

We only come to peace because of money.

If the US were to withdraw its aid, yes we can get funding from somewhere else and stay afloat. But, we can't do it without help. So, for the sake of money we are willing to sit down and talk.

Yes, we can decide not to accept Kerry's arbitration and go to war, but in the end we will need to stop the war at some point, somehow.

If our country was not in a strategic geo-political situation, no one would care about us and would allow us to rot.

If our country did not matter and we knew we could not blackmail people by threat of war, we would be really good behaving children, so that our poor country could have the mercy of the world and help us with some old clothing or leftover crumbs.

We should find a way for progress for our own sake. We should live within our means, and work for what we want.

It is time for us to stand on our own two feet. We have natural resources. If we are united, no one can rule us by dividing us.

However, because we have always sold ourselves to someone, we know our neighbours would find a solution for peace by proxy government, just to keep their countries at peace or at least in control of the situation.

So, we would tell these neighbours that we can be their proxy, in order to come to power.

We do not understand the value of living within our means and living in peace with our own brother. Until we do, we will always be servants for our neighbours, guised in Afghan clothing.

It is ironic that we have always been dependent on foreign aid, yet we pride ourselves the loudest with our slogans that we are an independent people.

[Tamim]

There are suggestions that a third run-off might end the conflict.

Since we cannot have two leaders, I think this is the best option.

This way a strict monitoring could perhaps take place right from the beginning as each vote is cast and counted.

I tell ya, soap opera!

[Tamim]

It is interesting to note:

The Abdullah team speaks of the "people" as if ALL of Afghanistan is on his side. He is just crying the loudest.

Abdullah thinks that as long as he keeps crying out loud and screaming that it will deafen people from listening to Ghani's side.

The whole nation is not on Abdullah's side. The whole nation is worried for its safety.

It is clear that Ghani also has concerns, but he is behaving himself. I guess Ghani is being beat in the art of jahaalat.

They say don't argue with an idiot, he will bring you down to his level and beat you with experience.

[dehqaanherawi]

There are suggestions that a third run-off might end the conflict.

Since we cannot have two leaders, I think this is the best option.

This way a strict monitoring could perhaps take place right from the beginning as each vote is cast and counted.

I tell ya, soap opera!

A third runoff? Hmm, man, how can we trust Ghani and Karzai are not going to commit again fraud?

This time pashtuns went too far. They know that and they are scared. They have exposed themselves.

[Tamim]

Man, afterward all the monkey business, i feel that it is so foolish and unwise to want to be a leader.

It appears the Prophet (saw) was right when he said not to ask for office. Let it be given to you.

[Tamim]

@dehqaanherawi, I have one question for you, have you ever met a Pashtun? If so, could you kindly describe your experience. Be honest and frank, please.

[Herat]

It is interesting to note:

The Abdullah team speaks of the "people" as if ALL of Afghanistan is on his side. He is just crying the loudest.

Abdullah thinks that as long as he keeps crying out loud and screaming that it will deafen people from listening to Ghani's side.

The whole nation is not on Abdullah's side. The whole nation is worried for its safety.

It is clear that Ghani also has concerns, but he is behaving himself. I guess Ghani is being beat in the art of jahaalat.

They say don't argue with an idiot, he will bring you down to his level and beat you with experience.

Tamim, there is a framework in social psychology known as "realistic conflict theory", that seems to make excellent sense from an evolutionary perspective, which I think essentially captures the problem of our part of Asia in a very non-biased and impartial way; the theory incorporates themes from both the realist school of political philosophy as well as economics: the basic idea is that different social groups (ethnic groups are an especially powerful mode of social group because they are rooted in that powerful aspect of human nature -tribalism- in fact the ethnic group from an evolutionary perspective may even be conceptualized as a sort of extended family as some kin selectionists who have examined the phenomena of ethnocentrism have done) often have conflicts of interests that are brought about by competition over scarce resources - here is the fundamental of economics - which may be for example real resources such as government funding in the various regions of Afghanistan (Pashtun in this forum have complained about a biased government only funding projects in the North and Tajiks insist on the opposite, I personally haven't been able to ascertain the matter in an evidence based investigation yet). More subtly, however, at least to the folk who have not studied any economics, resources may be defined very generally: for example, political power and what I call the "cultural-infrastructural capital" (by which I mean, for example, the influence of say Farsi or Pashto in the media) would also be counted as scarce resources. The former is what I think describes the issue youre trying to do in a more non-biased way: you see, to the Tajiks, the benefits of even a Tajik warlord like Abdullah exceeds the costs of a Pashtun like Ghani, that says something about Tajiks, doesnt it? However, I think that the same would also be true of Pashtuns as well, if there were a technocratic Tajik version of Ghani, I don't think hed get the Pashtun vote ipso facto. To put all of this more simply: Afghanistan is just a failed state where the main determinant of most loyalty issues including political ones are ethnic interests.

So how do we solve this problem? The answer is simple, we get rid of the "means of competition" over the same resource pool and thereby the means of conflict of interests: we partition the country. Many scholars who have examined the phenomena of warfare and conflict have remarked about its historically, comparatively decreasing intensity into the modern world; Steven Pinker has written a popular book on the topic (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined) and although he has discussed the state within the context of the Hobbesian "Leviathan", which is certainly a factor, I think he has missed a key point, in the light of realistic conflict theory, in examining the phenomenon that is that form of social organization known as the state: ethnic homogeneity. You see, the real ingenuity of the ethnically homogeneous state is this: it circumscribes an ethnic group to an agreed territory and therefore also its economic resource pool, that is, it also eliminates the direct "means of competition" with other ethnic groups. Not surprisingly, we make the trivial observation that there is a strong correlation between ethnic heterogeneity within a nation and ethnic conflict (this is more than a trivial observation, people have done actual studies on the matter but I can't seem to remember the literature that I read on it), as instantiated by the recent balkanizations of the Ukraine and now Iraq. On a final note, another feature of the ethnically homogenous state is that it is also highly conducive to regional cooperation: when different groups are not competing over the same resource pool, the only other interaction available to them is mutually beneficial interactions (e.g. trade).

[Tamim]

Thank you for your post.

So, I will address your points one by one, and we can discuss them as we go.

The first point that I feel I should address is:

Dividing Afghanistan in not an option for me. I do think that we can move forward despite having a multicultural, multilingual, multiethnic, and multireligious nation.

The problem from my point of view is, first, the geopolitical positioning of Afghanistan; second, the natural resources of Afghanistan; and third, the foreignness of Afghanistan in the globalized world.

All of these problems are of two fold, the world needs Afghanistan to globalized and it is hard due to the fact that Afghanistan has always remained neutral until Zahir Shah was overthrown, and since then Afghanistan have been in a 40 year struggle to find its identity. The second problem is our commitment to Islam. We are a nation who are die-hard Muslims, but we do not have the proper guidelines of Islam. We have always been fooled by the clergy.

These clergy say all of their actions are for the sake of God, but then the empirical evidence shows that we are a godless nation. This is very evident in the behaviour of Afghans in general.

The solution in my point of view is:

So, a) Afghanistan needs to become part of the international community, somehow; and b) Afghans need to reconcile with Islam. Either follow it to the T, or drop it from the constitution.

For example, Dr Abdullah's prologue is Islam, but his actions are totally against Islamic principles. His latest behaviour is an afront to Islamic principles. Leadership is not a right. You can't hold a people hostage because you want leadership. But, because he mentions God, innocent people think that he is the legitimate winner. Secondly, Dr Ghani is walking around with his tasbih as if he is now a holy person, what is this nonsense?

This is how I see it.

[dehqaanherawi]

@dehqaanherawi, I have one question for you, have you ever met a Pashtun? If so, could you kindly describe your experience. Be honest and frank, please.

I have pashtun relatives. There are many pashtuns in Herat (Adraskan, Shindand, Guzara and Pashtun Zarghun are mainly inhabited by persianized pashtuns) and I must say that my experience with those pashtuns is positive, after all, they speak my language and we share culture. I don't care about their ethnic background.

Honestly speaking I have met many "real pashtuns" but I don't like them. I feel like a stranger among them. We have nothing in common. Anyway I must say most of them were nice people but when it comes to politics.. you know.

[Tamim]

I have pashtun relatives. There are many pashtuns in Herat (Adraskan, Shindand, Guzara and Pashtun Zarghun are mainly inhabited by persianized pashtuns) and I must say that my experience with those pashtuns is positive, after all, they speak my language and we share culture. I don't care about their ethnic background.

Honestly speaking I have met many "real pashtuns" but I don't like them. I feel like a stranger among them. We have nothing in common. Anyway I must say most of them were nice people but when it comes to politics.. you know.

Nothing you have said is bad...i wonder why you are so anti-Pashtun? Thank you for answering the question. I guess we each have our prejudices for whatever reason.

[dehqaanherawi]

Nothing you have said is bad...i wonder why you are so anti-Pashtun? Thank you for answering the question. I guess we each have our prejudices for whatever reason.

I am not "anti-pashtun". I don't hate pashtuns. But as a tajik I have my own interests just like pashtuns. Pashtunism is a threat to my identity ergo I reject it.