Afghan Elections Show Two Sides of Democracy

SHAMALI PLAINS, Afghanistan, Aug. 17, 2009 — -- A dozen village elders sitting in a lonely, tattered tent in the desert outside of Kabul received the U.N. election worker kindly, thumbing the mock ballot he provided featuring 41 small headshots -- the faces of every man and woman running to become Afghanistan's next president.

Election posters attached to the ropes supporting the tent rustled in the breeze.

These villagers are some of the most isolated of Afghans, nomadic Kutchi tribesmen and women who have to walk for four hours to get water. And yet Lal Mohammad Niazi, the U.N. worker, has been visiting tents just like this one for months in the run up to Afghanistan's second ever election, scheduled for Thursday.

Asked whether they plan to vote Thursday, the group of bearded men all raise their hands -- some raise two hands -- a testament to the efforts by the United Nations and the Independent Electoral Commission to reach much of this rocky, rural country and inform them about an event that President Obama has called the most important in Afghanistan this year.

But asked who they would vote for, Malik Ghundi, the tribal leader, answered for them.

"People will come to me to ask to whom they should vote; I might say Karzai, Dr. Abdullah, or Dr. Ghani," Ghundi said, referring to the Afghan president and two of his most formidable rivals. "But whatever candidate I say, they will vote accordingly."

Much of Afghan democracy is do-as-you're-told -- voting blocs created by ethnic or tribal loyalties that often determine who entire areas of the country favor. That has led the heavily favored president, Hamid Karzai, to worry about security preventing his voting bloc -- Pashtuns, who dominate southern and eastern Afghanistan -- from going to the polls.

And it is what led Dr. Abdullah Abdullah to spend one of his final days campaigning in the Panhjir Valley, where he is remembered as the lieutenant to Afghanistan's most famous and popular warlord.

As he arrived in the village of Talatkhan, the crowd surged and grabbed the candidate's seersucker jacket. A second later he was lifted up and carried into the building, like a rock star crowd-surfing onto the stage.