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COMMENTARY
October 13, 2004
Elections
The election results for Afghanistan will take weeks to be fully counted. Some of the ballot boxes can be shipped only by trek and pack-mule -- a U.N. helicopter went down yesterday trying to expedite a delivery from the mountains of Badakshan. It has been reminiscent of the heroism the overcoming of seemingly insuperable logistical obstacles in the world's largest democracy of India. Somehow it is made to work and the result is not merely a freely-chosen government but a national society armed against its own ancestral fatalism. It is the style today in our decadence in the West to be glib about elections and dismissive of attempts to hold them in places like Afghanistan. I have myself come near to ridiculing the Bush administration's "obsession" with forcing elections on cultures unprepared for them. There were enough teething pains in this Afghan one including the mix-up over inks in which early voters in some districts had their hands too delibly marked with the ink meant for the ballots (and vice versa) leading to opposition allegations of fraud. But the irregularities are being properly investigated and most of the objections have now been withdrawn. The United Nations incidentally deserves real praise for its efforts to stage the election and authenticate results and for the bravery of its agents in the field. It is one of the few things the U.N. does well. And President Hamid Karzai deserves praise for never wavering. And President Bush for making the whole thing possible. He was right and I was wrong: millions upon millions of Afghans have now by means of the election bought into the new order that came with the liberation the Americans led. Each man and woman who took the risk -- against very plausible threats to wreak carnage from the Taliban and Al Qaeda -- has voted against the Jihad in the most effective way possible. Each by voting has also undermined the Afghan warlords trying to reclaim traditional regional authority from out of the country's pre-Taliban past. The Jihad has been dealt an especially sharp setback as we can only hope it will be dealt when Iraq votes in January. For the whole focus of the Jihadi terror has been upon preventing these elections from happening -- elections that could only confer legitimacy upon the new infidel constitutional order. It has indeed in Afghanistan: Let freedom ring! The Bush-haters who manage the news in the mainstream media back here have had a similar reaction choosing largely to ignore this most spectacular success of the President's foreign policy as they have ignored the genuinely inspiring story of the beleaguered reconstruction of Iraq. They know that any good news about what America has achieved could damage John F. Kerry's election prospects and so they dwell exclusively on the body count and use telescopes to descry dark clouds on the horizon. In Iraq the Shia militias are turning in their weapons in Sadr City and elsewhere. U.S.-trained Iraqi soldiers are for the first time leading the charge against Jihadis ensconced in mosques in Ramadi and a bold operation to clear pockets of resistance to democracy before the coming election is now enjoying much success. But the headlines are reserved only for car bombs beheadings and U.S. and allied casualties. Body count body count: this is journalism's contribution to the culture of death. And now to Australia where Prime Minister John Howard and his (conservative) Liberal and Country coalition has won decisively a fourth consecutive term. The conventional view from the media including the major Australian newspapers and networks is that the election was not decidedly not a "referendum on Australian participation in Iraq". They had thought it was just that when during the campaign the Labour opposition leader Mark Latham broke with the unwritten code in discussing Australian foreign policy -- bipartisan agreement not to undermine the work of Australian servicemen abroad. He did this by promising to bring the troops home from Iraq by Christmas (before "nuancing" that). Indeed the Australian media provided the cheering section for Mr. Latham and gloated in advance at what a rebuke his victory would be to President Bush in the States. But as the election approached and the polls showed Mr. Howard more and more likely to win suddenly the election ceased to be about Iraq and became "only about the economy" (wherein Mr. Howard's low-tax low-regulatory policies have helped keep Australia booming). Now the world media echoes the Australian media in assuring us that No, that result had nothing to do with Iraq. But let it be noted that because of that election Australia will continue being America's most reliable ally: Aussies and Yanks together in the trenches fighting against the most despicable tyrants in every major conflict of the last hundred years including Vietnam. Cynicism and defeatism may triumph in the airwaves but praise the Lord: it doesn't always triumph on the ground. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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