Afghan Voters Ask - Why Bother With a Karzai-Abdullah Runoff? - NYTimes.com

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By SABRINA TAVERNISE

KABUL, Afghanistan — As experts pore over ballots to determine whether the fraud in this country’s presidential election was so big that a runoff vote was required, many Afghans interviewed here on Tuesday shared the same view: Why bother?

In shops, offices and bakeries around the capital, many Afghans said holding a second round of voting to designate a winner simply did not make sense.

It was not that they did not want a final result. Or that they thought the Aug. 20 election had been fraud-free. But years of disappointment in their government has hardened into cynicism, and many said a second round would only lead to another flawed result.

“It’s a waste of time and money,” said Muhammad Hashem Haideri, a 52-year-old movie theater manager. “It would be useless.”

The Afghans interviewed here are only a small sampling of opinion in this ethnic patchwork of a country. The largely Pashtun south supports the incumbent, President Hamid Karzai, who won 54 percent of the vote, enough to avoid a runoff, according to the preliminary tally. His supporters vigorously oppose more voting.

But parts of the north back Mr. Karzai’s main opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, a Tajik. Many of his supporters say that their votes were stolen and want a second round. Mr. Abdullah won about 28 percent of the vote.

Still, the ethnic jumble of Kabul — a dusty, sprawling city of four million whose horse carts and turbaned old men give it the feeling of a frontier town from a past century — provides a fairly broad reach even with a small sample of voices.

Zainab Hussein Zada, 21, a pharmacy student from Parwan Province, in central Afghanistan, said that she was disappointed by the messy result, but that it reflected the level of the country’s democratic skills. Afghanistan, in other words, is not Switzerland, and it is unrealistic to expect it to behave in an election as if it were.

“It was not very fair, and there were many mistakes, but this is the situation in our country,” she said, sitting on a green bench outside the pharmacy department at Kabul University. “It’s better just to accept this result.”

That might seem cynical, considering the level of fraud, but it is a measure of how tired Afghans have become in recent years of the corruption that runs through their government. Their faith in politics is at a dismal low, which, in addition to fears about security, helped suppress voter turnout. A European Union team of observers has estimated that about a million of Mr. Karzai’s votes were suspect.

Habibullah Sarosh, 23, a fast-talking film student, said that in 2004 he waited in line for hours to cast his vote.

“I went to the polling station with a passion in my heart,” he said. “I thought my vote would change the destiny of my country, but I was wrong.”

This time, the polling station was empty, and Mr. Sarosh said he voted “out of obligation.” As for a potential second round, he said, “It won’t solve our problems.”

Some said that getting to the second round would be a good exercise in democracy for Afghans. Mr. Karzai, they said, would be humbled, and his opposition would feel it had accomplished something.

But no one interviewed wanted to go through with the vote, and everyone offered suggestions about how to avoid it. Muhammad Sabur Hashemi, 36, a bridal shop owner, said Mr. Karzai and Mr. Abdullah should join in a coalition government. Mr. Haideri, the theater manager, said the United States government should choose.

“Everybody is dreaming of a good, competent government made by the United States and NATO,” he said mournfully to the thumping beat of a Bollywood movie.

Afghanistan’s problem, he said, was its ethnic divisions.

“The Afghan people are not mentally united,” he said. “An Uzbek will never vote for a Tajik. A Tajik will never vote for a Pashtun.”

Muhammad Ghazi, a 21-year-old baker, had a different view, one far more common among Afghans: a belief that the United States would simply impose its own candidate.

“Even if every Afghan casts their vote for Abdullah, he won’t be president because the foreigners don’t want him to be,” he said, slinging long flat slabs of Afghan bread at customers through a window. “Nobody respected the people’s vote.”

Mr. Haideri strongly disagreed. The election was Afghan, he said, and that was a major part of the problem. The government is a bitter disappointment, he said, particularly after the brutal years of civil war and Taliban rule that had left his theater looking like, in his words, “a trash can.”

“We are watching people with no education become ministers with luxury cars and many houses,” he said. “It makes me feel very sad.”

Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting.