Afghanistan's marathon presidential election brings country to standstill

May Jeong

Government institutions are feeling strain after 11 months of process, with observers still auditing result

Eleven months into Afghanistan's marathon presidential vote, strains are being felt across government institutions.

The two candidates, Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani, made progress by publicly agreeing to respect the results of the audit, but it will take some time still for observers to go through all 8.1 million votes.

Meanwhile, the rest of the country has ground to a halt, and stasis is most keenly felt in government bureaucracies, where senior officials have expressed concern over the potentially damaging effects of a prolonged stalemate. Hakim Mujahed, the deputy chairman of the high peace council, a government body responsible for negotiations with the Taliban, said all meaningful work had stopped in early spring, during the first round of the elections. Now he whiles away his hours crossing off the administrative chores from his to-do list.

"The election has become totally frustrating for the people of Afghanistan, including myself," he said. "It is a defamation of democracy."

The Taliban has refused to engage with the current government, as they rightly assume that the incoming administration will have different policies from its predecessor. Both the council and the Taliban, he said, are eager for new leadership.

"We are very frustrated by the audit process. It is a great impediment and obstacle to our work."

The economy minister, Abdul Arghandiwal, said his office was also suffering.

"To implement our policies we need planning, and that has been difficult to do," he said.

He excoriated the international community for withholding the funding that keeps the Afghan government running. Arghandiwal said donors had said they would wait until the new government signed a security agreement allowing troops to stay in the country beyond 2014 before releasing an estimated $1bn in funding.

"Most of our projects are on hold, and if this situation continues it can only mean one thing: economic crisis."

The electoral commission believes their observers – spread out at 100 tables in three hangars and working in two six-hour shifts every day – can complete their task in the next two weeks, in time to meet the end of August deadline.

There are, however, variables at play beyond the control of the electoral commission. The speed of the audit process may pick up as it gets streamlined, but a likelier scenario is that the factors that have threatened to derail the audit may once again impinge on the process.

There is the logistical task of putting together a full audit, the only one of its kind in the world, on a daily basis, not to mention the fact that the candidate observers are each pursuing irreconcilable goals of validating their votes while invalidating the other parties'.

The international community hopes that the process will be completed by the end of the month, in time for the newly inaugurated president to attend the Nato summit in September.

Fabrizio Foschini of the Afghanistan Analysts Network called this timeline "suspiciously optimistic".

"If we can agree that delays, stalemates and obstructionism have been a recurrent theme of this electoral process, it does seem possible that this pattern extends to the political negotiations that will accompany the creation of a new government, whoever the winning candidate will be," he said.

"And if that happens, it could be a bad year for all Afghans."