Warlord politics heats Afghan vote

As the hometown of the current Afghan president, Kandahar should be wrapped up for Hamid Karzai. But look around, and you'll see campaign posters - lots of them - for Mr. Karzai's chief opponent, Yunis Qanooni.

That Mr. Qanooni, former education minister and ethnic Tajik northerner, would even venture into the ethnic Pashtun heartland of Kandahar is shocking enough, but to have southern Pashtuns supporting him by the thousands, that's the stuff of fantasy. It's as if Howard Dean had shown up at a NASCAR event and sung the national anthem - and the crowd went wild.

Qanooni's campaign draws its greatest support by courting the substantial number of Afghan veterans who fought against the Soviet occupation of the 1980s. In effect, he is creating Afghanistan's own "greatest generation," a powerful voting bloc that fears losing power and influence in the next government.

How serious is the Qanooni threat? Some senior UN election officials now predict that Karzai will not gather the 51 percent of votes required to win Saturday's first-ever Afghan presidential election outright.

The results of Saturday's vote will not be known for two to three weeks; a runoff would follow two weeks after.

"My gut tells me we'll have a second round of elections," says one UN election official. "In a way, that would be a good scenario for the country. It won't look so much like a fixed deal."

Karzai is still predicted to gain the most votes in the Oct. 9 election, but with 18 candidates no one may come out looking like a clear winner. Though most observers expect Karzai to emerge the eventual winner in a second round, this election has made Karzai look vulnerable, tarnished his image with charges of drug trafficking by his supporters and appointees, and challenged American assumptions of his long-term viability as a national leader.

To be sure, Qanooni's basic strategy is a risky one. Against Karzai's stated policy of disarming "warlords" and armed militias, Qanooni is reminding Afghans of the reasons why these fighters became mujahideen in the first place: to defeat the Soviet occupation of 1979 to 1989. Recasting lawless militias as warm and fuzzy heroes may seem counterintuitive, but it plays to the same feelings that many Americans, Britons, and French feel about the generation that fought in World War II.

Demographically speaking, it's brilliant. Nearly every Afghan family has at least one father, son, or cousin who was a mujahid.

"We shouldn't call mujahideen 'warlords,' we shouldn't call mujahideen 'illiterates,' and we shouldn't call mujahideen the people who have guns on their shoulders," said Qanooni, speaking from a large campaign rally at Kabul's football stadium on Tuesday. "The mujahideen are those that stood against the Soviet Union, against the terrorists, against the Taliban. And we want a country where the mujahideen have a role and the leader of that government will be Qanooni."

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