NORTH AGAINST SOUTH

Vote counting is under way following the presidential election in Afghanistan.  How-ever, the official results are to be announced no earlier than 17 September.  And if a second round is required, it will be held only after the month of Ramadan.

For now, however, two people have declared themselves victor: the incumbent head of state, Hamid Karzai, and his principal opponent, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah.

Din Muhammed, head of the incumbent president's election headquarters, declared Karzai the winner, citing preliminary results, although he did not specify the source.  Muhammed also claimed confidently that there would be "no second round."

At the same time, Sayed Aqa Fazil Sancharaki, press secretary of Dr Abdullah Abdullah's electoral headquarters, said that the "results which we have from our observers in the election precincts say that we received 63% of the votes and Hamid Karzai received 31%."

In the first hours after the end of voting, Kabul began to receive congratulations:  despite the Taliban's threats to "cut off the hands and cut the throats of those who go to vote," the election did take place.  Earlier, it had been so bad that the Afghan authorities banned the media from reporting explosions and shootouts until all the electoral precincts were closed.

And the bacchanalia of terror, in the mean time, was quite impressive.  In just one hour after the start of voting in the capital, seven explosive devices went off; they had been hidden in trash bins and bags.  On election day, Kabul came under missile fire.  One rocket-propelled missile exploded in the Wazir Akbar Khan district and a residential building was damaged in a different district.  Lashkar Gah, the administrative centre of Helmand province, and the provincial centre of Kandahar, came under mortar fire.

Despite all this, 40 to 50% of voters took part in the election.  Afghans are unlikely to consider it a serious violation that many men voted on behalf of their wives and adult daughters.

Experts say that the very fact of holding election with more than 30 candidates, televised debates and so forth, is important for Afghanistan.

For example, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica pointed out in a report on sentiment in Afghanistan in the run-up to the elections:  the truth is that the majority of Afghans do believe in this election.  Amina, a young secretary who arrived in Kabul from the north of the country, told the newspaper that "violence, corruption and illegality are still rampant, there has always been violence and it will always be here, but we need to go and vote."  According to Vanda Felbab-Brown, a researcher into foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, wrote in The Los Angeles Times before the election that this election was an opportunity to give Afghans at least some sense of control of their future.

It is no less important that the election may consolidate and improve the government's control of the country, which is necessary in the fight against the rebels and to achieve stabilisation and reconstruction.  But even fair elections free of violence cannot guarantee that a much-needed improvement in governance will take place.

In the mean time, after the first wave of congratulations on the "very fact," experts began to admit that in the conditions of warring Afghanistan, the perfect conduct of elections is impossible in principle.  That being so, there is a great risk that after the results are announced the loser will refuse to accept his rival's victory.

Corriere Della Sera points out that there were no exit polls, opinion polls, or preliminary results of the elections.

Of course, the atmosphere in Afghanistan cannot be compared with the situation in Tehran, but the scenario remains just as unclear.  Experts say that Abdullah Abdullah voiced his ambition to become president back in 2002.  Kamelia Entehabi-Fard, a journalist who writes for many periodicals about Afghanistan and Iraq, wrote about him in flattering terms.  "Afghanistan is a huge and very dusty country.  But there are oases of cleanness and quiet, where you can escape the dust.  Among them is the foreign minister's residence in the northern part of Kabul, with a fine garden and flower beds.  There are flowers in the rooms, and you smell them as soon as you enter.  Polite young men apologize every 10 minutes for the inconvenience of waiting.  This is the headquarters of Dr Abdullah Abdullah, a representative of the new generation of Afghan politicians."

"Foreign Minister Abdullah invited more than 10 young Afghans from all over the world to this oasis.  They are typical technocrats which, as the government hopes, will be able to implement a programme to rehabilitate the country.  The majority of them left Afghanistan as children and acquired their much-needed skills and experience abroad.  Like Abdullah, most of these people are ethnic Tajiks, hazel-eyed and light-skinned.  And the majority of them are natives of the Panjsher Valley in the northeast of Afghanistan," explained Entehabi-Fard.

In other words, the rift is much more serious than might be apparent at first sight, and not only because it introduces into political rivalry a hint of clannish or ethnic confrontation.  Differences between Karzai and Abdullah caused many people to recollect the sensational "leak" in The Times in autumn 2001, when NATO had just begun its anti-Taliban operation in Afghanistan.  The leak was about much earlier events, from the mid-20th century when, in 1947, the Middle East was shaken by an unprecedented geopolitical storm:  two independent states, India and Pakistan, were created in British India (later, Bangladesh too, which was part of Pakistan, won independence).

According to the Times article, Britain had plans for a division of Afghanistan in 1950, along the Hindu Kush mountain range between the former USSR and Pakistan.  A letter to John Gardener, British Ambassador in Kabul, which was written by the British Foreign Office in June 1951, read that "if a coup occurs (in Afghanistan), which is quite likely, the disappearance of that country will not be a tragedy:  in the present situation, Afghanistan's viability in the foreseeable future is questionable" - because the country is a collection of provinces which are not linked to one another either historically or economically.

This assessment merits attention.  Many experts recall that references to ancient history and culture rather than to the countries of the "golden billion" is a characteristic feature of political discussions in the East, be it Near, Middle, or Far.  But unfortunately, by no means all the countries in the region fall into the category of established political entities.  Afghanistan appeared on the world map only in the middle of the 19th century, during the "great game" in Central Asia, when Britain was broadening its empire from the south, and Russia was doing the same from the north.  Both empires "swallowed", without any great difficulty, local principalities, khanates, emirates and, of course, deserts, whose residents did not know themselves to whom the area belonged.  Sooner or later, the empires were bound to clash, but war was in neither Britain's nor Russia's interests.  In the end, London decided to resort to its traditional tactic and created between Russia's Turkestan and British India a buffer state, Afghanistan, whose borders were demarcated in quite ad hoc fashion:  the Durand line, which was to become the present-day Afghan-Pakistani border, "cut through" historic Pashtustan and centuries-old nomadic routes.  The north of Afghanistan included territories which traditionally leaned towards Samarkand and Bukhara, rather than to Kabul and Kandahar.  This is why today, while in the south of Afghanistan the majority of the population are ethnic Pushtus, in the north the majority are ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks.  And because the country has always been poor and underdeveloped, lacking roads and infrastructure, "shaping" it into something coherent has always been a vain effort.

The royal dynasty of Afghanistan, which was ethnically Pushtu, was more or less successful in maintaining a balance between the north and south.  But now the situation is fundamentally different, and was upset, strange as this might sound, not by Soviet invaders or NATO, but by the very same mujahedeen who failed to share power among themselves after the withdrawal of Soviet troops.  The previous authoritative leaders of Afghanistan, Rabbani and Ahmad Shah Massoud, were ethnic Tajiks from the north, whereas the Taliban are mostly ethnic Pushtus.  It was precisely during the Taliban rule that many Pushtu clan leaders decided they did not have to share power and influence with the Tajiks and Uzbeks.  And the Tajiks and Uzbeks, for their part, believe, and with good reason, that after the toppling of the Taliban, the "controlling share" of power in the country should not belong to Pushtus.  And this poses a real danger of a split in the country.

Declassified documents from the Foreign Office show that Ambassador Gardener was not particularly enthusiastic about the proposal.  Although he admitted that there was a risk of a "vacuum of power," which the USSR might use to its advantage, he nonetheless informed the Foreign Office that, in his view, a strategy to divide Afghanistan was dangerous, because any forces occupying the country would have to deal with the "headache" of resistance by local residents.  His opinion was a decisive factor in sending the plans for a division of Afghanistan to the archives, The Times noted.  Especially as nothing dramatic was happening there.

But now that warning sounds convincing again, and it cannot be ruled out that the world will once again discuss plans to divide Afghanistan.  Especially if Karzai and Abdullah cannot reach agreement.