These things take time, Elven. Germany and Japan were not prosperous and safe in the space of a year after their militaries surrendered, but it gradually happened. Ceratinly things are much better for the iraqis now than they were under Saddam, and better for the Afghans than they were under the Taliban. And they keep getting better still. See?
OPTIMISM IN AFGHANISTAN
RYAN SAGER
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/28160.htmTHERE'S good news from the forgotten front of the War on
Terror: The first-ever public opinion poll in Afghanistan shows
that people there are optimistic about the future and excited about
upcoming elections.
But you wouldn't know it from the mainstream press, which
received the poll with a level of skepticism usually reserved for
Yeti sightings and money transfers originating in Nigeria. The
most coverage given to the poll so far: a five-sentence news brief
in The Washington Post.
Perhaps some folks worry that the news is a bit too convenient for
President Bush.
With the situation in Iraq seen by many as a mess, Afghanistan
has a constitution, is registering voters and is moving toward
holding a presidential election in October. And the survey of 804
randomly selected male and female Afghan citizens,
commissioned by the Asia Foundation notes that:
* 64 percent say the country is heading in the right direction.
* 81 percent say that they plan to vote in the October election.
* 77 percent say they believe the elections will "make a
difference."
* 64 percent say they rarely or never worry about their personal
safety, while under the Taliban only 36 percent felt that way.
* 62 percent rate President Hamid Karzai's performance as either
good or excellent.
This was no pro-Bush put-up job. The polling firm, Charney
Research, is a partisan Democratic polling firm. And superstar
Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, who's read the study ” and
who has worked on similar polling in developing countries ”
calls it "very reliable."
Perhaps the media skepticism comes from the notion that it is
simply too difficult to conduct a poll in a war-torn state like
Afghanistan.
But if there's an expert in polling in the midst of turmoil, it would
be the principal of Charney Research, Craig Charney. He's done
opinion research everywhere from Nicaragua to East Timor to
Lebanon ” with results that were borne out when voters went to
the polls.
The job is a lot tougher than polling in the United Sates. First,
Afghanistan's a tough country in which to get around ” for
logistical and security reasons, Charney says three of the country's
32 provinces, with some 6 percent of the population, were
inaccessible.
Second, Afghanistan hasn't had an official census since the 1970s.
One's underway, but not complete, so Charney and his team had to
rely on U.N. estimates to determine where population centers
were.
But Charney Research, in accordance with international standards,
randomly selected villages ” and then families within those
villages, and then members within those families ” for in-depth
interviews in the appropriate language, Dari or Pashtu.
Participants overwhelmingly said they felt free to speak, and
plenty of them exercised that right by criticizing their government.
Security and the economy were the greatest national concerns.
"It's mixed news," said a former legal adviser to Afghanistan's
constitution commission, Alexander Thier of the Hoover
Institution. After 30 years that represented "one long, unremitting
descent into chaos," he said, "people have seen that there really is
a possibility that the long downward spiral is over."
What Thier finds worrying in the report is that, while Afghans are
looking forward to voting, only 37 percent were confident that
elections would be free and fair.
In a country with a history of civil war, this could spell trouble. "If
most Afghans aren't confident about elections, it will be easy for
people who are unhappy to turn others against the results," Thier
said.
But since the presidential election will be held first ” followed
by parliamentary elections next spring ” there's a chance for
things to go smoothly, Thier said.
Karzai is very popular ” Bush can only wish he had Karzai's
numbers ” and there's no serious opposition to him this October.
So, in effect, that election can serve as a dry run before the
potentially more divisive elections in 2005.
"Afghans would like to see democracy in their country after
decades of war," Charney said. "Even those who say they are
dissatisfied say they want more aid, not the return of the Taliban."
"Many people said, 'Thank you for asking,' " he said. "No one's
ever asked."
Early Steps, Maybe, Toward a
Democracy in Iraq
By IAN FISHER
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/27/international/middleeast/27conf.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 26 - Whether democracy is really coming
to Iraq, or whether it is even possible here, seemed of no
immediate concern to Dr. Ahmad Abu-Raghif, a physician in
Baghdad. He was game anyway.
He showed up at a university hall here on Sunday with a good
haircut, a blue suit and a big smile: the outfit of the office-seeker
worldwide. He buttonholed 50 people, he said, at the grass-roots
caucus, making the pitch for their votes.
"I explained myself to a lot of people," Dr. Abu-Raghif, 37, said
before the voting began. "I have a Ph.D. I am a city council
member. And I think I am a good candidate to win." Plus he had
personal connections, which never hurt.
"Some of them are my patients," he confided.
His Western-style vote-corralling is part of what may become the
birth of democracy in Iraq, something that never really existed
here. As with much in Iraq since the American invasion, the
experiment is at once inspiring and troubled, full of potential but
not at all assured of success.
Caucuses like the one Dr. Abu-Raghif attended have been
convening around Iraq to select roughly 1,000 delegates, who will
hold a national conference in Baghdad in the next week.
The concrete goal of the conference is to vote - openly and freely -
on a 100-seat transitional council that will oversee the government
of Iyad Allawi, the interim prime minister, until national elections
are held in January. But the conference is also meant to function
as an opportunity for a national dialogue, in which for the first
time since the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraqis from all religions,
regions and political and ethnic groups begin to discuss the way
forward.
With widespread violence and fragmentation, that has turned out
to be difficult, so much so that the United Nations is urging Iraq to
postpone the conference at least briefly.
A thousand or more fledgling politicians make a tempting terror
target, aside from the many logistical challenges - as basic as
where everyone will sleep - that surround such a big event. But
the major issue is that many groups considered crucial to any
broad national dialogue are refusing to take part, largely because
they view the process as controlled by the United States.
Wamidh Nadhmi, a newspaper editor and a leader in two
nationalist parties that are refusing to attend, said exercises like
the conference seemed aimed more at "public opinion in America
to tell them that authority was passed to the Iraqi people.''
"This argument might help Mr. Bush in his election, but the
change is very little in Iraq," he said. "We do not want to be part
of this American solution."
In recent days United Nations officials have been urging the
conference's organizers to postpone it to give more time to bring
groups like Mr. Nadhmi's on board.
Others who have refused to attend but are considered major
players include the Muslim Scholars Association, a relatively
moderate group of Sunni Muslim clerics and intellectuals, and the
rebel Shiite Muslim cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who has a large
following among poor and angry Shiites.
Jamal Benomar, the United Nations diplomat who is advising Iraq
on the conference, called it "a huge challenge" that "cannot be
rushed." He said more time was needed to convince reluctant
groups that they should join and to publicize the event more to
lend it wider legitimacy.
"It is not just to delay it for the sake of delaying it," Mr. Benomar
said. "That is not acceptable. If it is to make it more successful,
and to minimize the risks, I think it is worth considering. But
again, this is a national conference. It is an Iraqi conference, and
it's up to the Iraqis to decide."
But Iraqi officials are balking at any delay. The transitional laws
that created the new government and scheduled the elections for
January also specified that the national conference was to take
place by the end of July. Fuad Masum, the Iraqi official who is
organizing the conference, said the credibility of the law, and thus
the entire process of creating a permanent government, requires
that it be held on time.
"The operation is proceeding forward," Mr. Masum said.
But he did not minimize the problems. "Naturally it's not an easy
procedure," he said. "It is something practically new for Iraqis."
The idea of a national conference was floated last fall by many
Iraqi leaders as a way that Iraqis themselves, rather than the
American occupation, could chose a new government and do so in
a broad and public way.
That remained the hope of some leaders here this spring as the
former United Nations special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi worked
with the United States and Iraqi leaders to craft an interim
government to take sovereignty at the end of June.
But the ultimate compromise settled on an appointed government,
with the conference to be held afterward. That deflated any hopes
for a more powerful or immediate role for the conference, even if
its specific task of appointing the transitional council remains
important. The council, while unable to pass laws, will be able to
veto government decisions, approve the 2005 budget and question
Dr. Allawi.
In many ways, though, the conference is significant as a test of
support for the new government and as an early glimpse of how
Iraqis are trying to move forward in this experiment toward
democracy.
One favorable sign is that several major groups that refused to
take part in Dr. Allawi's government are now taking part in the
national conference, thus endorsing at the least the process
established in May by the United States and the United Nations.
The most important are the various branches of the Dawa Islamic
Party, the Shiite Muslim party that is the biggest in Iraq.
Khudar Jaafar al-Kuzai, the party's leader, said it could not
endorse Dr. Allawi's government because it was appointed -
"something that Iraqis reject," he said. This new conference, he
said, is much closer to an election and may help prepare the
nation for actual elections in January.
"We are very pleased to take part in this experiment," he said.
"We want to live this experiment."
After 35 years of dictatorship under Mr. Hussein, the process is
unlike anything most Iraqis have ever seen. The conference has
two complicated stages, which started with the selection recently
of 1,000 delegates from the nation's tribes, political parties and
trade and artistic unions.
More than 500 of the delegates are being selected from the
various regions by local caucuses, an exercise in the chaos of
democracy that has struck some here with both surprise and anger.
The biggest problem so far, organizers say, is that among the
groups that want to take part, there has been an almost
unmanageable number of candidates. In Kut, a Shiite city south of
Baghdad, 1,248 people competed for 22 seats. In Najaf, a city
considered sacred by Shiites because of its shrines, there were 920
candidates for 20 seats, prompting complaints from Mr. Sadr's
group and other leaders that the process was not inclusive or
democratic enough.
At the caucus in Baghdad, one of four for this city of five million
people, 436 people competed for 40 seats, 10 of which were set
aside for women. Women are to hold 25 percent of the seats on
the council.
In some ways the Baghdad caucus, held in an auditorium at
Baghdad University, was a democrat's dream: candidates stood up
with a microphone and nominated themselves openly as men on
stage wrote out their names in marker on whiteboards for
everyone to see.
The most ambitious, like Dr. Abu-Raghif, worked the crowd,
which was itself not elected but appointed by political parties,
local government councils and aid groups. Voting was on pieces
of paper, tucked into five wooden ballot boxes, and the counting
was public.
"We have heard about the development of Europe, how they
began with simple steps like this one," said Arian Said Kalaf, 59,
a well-known poet and columnist in Iraq who was competing for a
seat at the conference. "We want to follow the same track."
But others complained of disorganization, of secret deals, of
candidates who were looking only to enrich themselves by
becoming part of politics here - complaints, to be fair, that are
often heard in democracies worldwide. Expectations here, though,
are high.
"They have to put their country before themselves," complained
Dhia Hamandi, 64, a merchant active in local affairs, who was
also vying for a delegate's seat. "That's the most important thing.
But 90 percent of these people put themselves first."
The challenges of the national conference, the date of which has
not yet been announced, are even more daunting. The 1,000
delegates must whittle themselves down to a 100-member council.
Of course, 22 of the seats are already taken by former members of
the Iraqi Governing Council, which was appointed last year by
American officials to help run the nation.
To be fully legitimate, Iraqis and foreign diplomats say, it must
somehow squeeze in representatives of all of Iraq's 25 million
people: every region; the Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds, as well
as Christians, Turkmen and other minorities; women; and various
political parties.
It must try to do so, as the United Nations has worried, without the
participation of several major Iraqi groups, some of which have
ties to the violent insurgents but still address the issues most
important here: violence, reconstruction, the justice system.
Perhaps most immediately, it must do so in an atmosphere of
violence, in which insurgents have turned increasingly to
kidnappings and assassinations of members of the new
government.
"Imagine how worried I am about this big occasion," said Mr.
Masum, the conference organizer.
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