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As another two British soldiers die in Afghanistan – killed by an RPG - bringing the grand total to 210 – the coalition powers are now paying the price for grossly over-selling the Afghan presidential election.

Thus does The Times report today that "West faces losing battle over Afghan poll fraud", retailing an admission from "Western and Afghan officials" that that widespread and systematic fraud during the elections has tarnished the legitimacy of any future government and undermined the Nato campaign.

More on Defence of the Realm.

AFG+vote[i-AFG+vote]
In the aftermath of the Operation Panther's Claw, on 28 July, David Miliband, our current foreign secretary was full of himself, telling us that several hundred British troops will remain in the area to provide ongoing security. "Hopefully," he said, "there will be a credible turnout at the Afghan elections in August."

He then cited Brigadier Tim Radford, Commander Task Force Helmand, who had said: "We are creating the conditions, as we have done in many other campaigns, so that a political process can take place above us, and that security at the moment is going extremely well."

Radford went on to say that which has only recently been repeated by Nick Gurr, the MOD's Director of Media and Communication, viz:

As a result of our forces' efforts, around 80,000 more Afghans in Helmand now live in areas under government control, giving around 20,000 more the chance to vote, with 13 additional polling centres becoming useable. That does not mean that turnout in Helmand will match that in less troubled provinces. Helmand is at the heart of the insurgency and that is bound to have an effect. But more people will be able to exercise their democratic choice than was the case before Panther's Claw.

Now cut to The Times of yesterday, and we read: "... fewer than 150 people actually cast their ballots in Nad e-Ali (at the heart of the Panther's Claw operation) out of about 48,000 registered voters, according to Engineer Abdul Hadee, the local head of the Independent Election Commission.

Then we read: "Mullah Ghulam Mohamamd Akhund, a Taleban commander in the district, said: 'Everything was fine. There were no polling centres and no voting. We didn't face any problems.'"

That this might be empty rhetoric is not borne out by other reports. For instance, here we read that only one of the three polling stations in Babaji was open (the other area on which Panther's Claw concentrated), and in Nad-e Ali voting only took place in the centre of town, with outlying stations remaining closed.

The situation, however, is perhaps even worse than that. Kim Sengupta reports for The Independent that, at one polling station in Nad-e-Ali, just over 400 people had voted by 1pm.

Three hours later, he writes, the figure had apparently surged to some 1,200. This [was] despite the fact the streets were empty, all shops and businesses were shut and an Afghan army officer saying his men standing guard had hardly seen any civilians heading to these particular voting booths.

Heedless of the so-called "security envelope" provided by Panther's Claw, the largest election monitoring group had refused to come to the district, deeming it still too dangerous. On the day there were rockets, machine-gun fire and mortar fire, roadside bombs, deaths and injuries.

Thus, at the conclusion of the poll, Sengupta tells us that election officials were seen counting piles of ballot papers, without even checking the choices, simply declaring the votes had been cast for incumbent president Hamid Karzai.

Still we have the twittering of the ghastly Caroline Wyatt and the attempts of the BBC to downplay the violence, yet in Kandahar province, 122 Taleban rockets were fired, with 20 falling on the city. Four people were killed and 12 wounded. This has not stopped the BBC presenting the election as a success.

In the real world, such has been the effect of the Taleban that, despite the ballot stuffing and rigging, in the disputed provinces of Kandahar, Helmand, Uruzgan and Zabul, turnout is estimated to be as low as 5 to 10 percent. That is half of what it was in those regions in the first presidential election five years ago – the last three of which have seen intensive fighting and repeated claims of how the Taleban has been beaten.

The uncertainty has allowed Karzai and his leading rival, Dr Abdullah Abdullah, to claim victory but the official results will not be declared until 25 August, but there are no bets as to who will actually come out on top. Karzai will "win", coming out with a clear majority, even if the ink is still wet on the ballot papers.

The farcical and corrupt nature of this election - with Gerald Warner suggesting that an Afghan ballot box with an untampered seal would probably fetch a fortune at Christie's for its rarity value - puts into perspective Nick Gunn's spin on behalf of his masters. In the words of one of our forum members: "Quite how our troops in Afghanistan would manage without the Herculean efforts of Nick and his team I just don't know. We're obviously very lucky to have him. The only remaining mystery is how the bastard sleeps at night."

What applies to Gurr, however, must apply to the whole sorry crew. Either Operation Panther's Claw was grossly oversold and the stated objectives were unrealistic, or they simply were not attained. Either way, the hopes of Mr Miliband were not fulfilled, even though 13 men had died in the effort to bring them to fruition – with many more injured. As for the election itself, rather than a move closer to a solution, it looks to opening wide the divisions in Afghanistan and reducing still further the legitimacy of the central government.

Says The Times, the credibility of the election "hangs in the balance". But, for their exaggerated claims, the credibility of Mr Miliband and the rest of those who trot out their glib phrases is already shot to pieces. You do not have to mock them. They mock themselves and, sadly, those who died for their witless posturing.

COMMENT THREAD

2009082150200101[i-2009082150200101]An honest reporter Michael Yon certainly is. I do not know how well the elections turned out in other parts of Afghanistan, he writes, but here in North Helmand Provence, near Sangin, I am told that less than 300 people voted.

In this area the day was marked by serious fighting, he tells us. Apache attack helicopters were firing their cannons throughout the day. The howitzers fired many times. The mortars were firing. Various bases were attacked. On the mission I accompanied the snipers were firing. We got into a firefight, and the soldier beside me had his antenna shot off.

Much the same story comes from Anthony Loyd, stationed in Sangin itself. Streaked with sweat, caked in dust and stinking of cordite, he writes, British soldiers in Sangin spent Afghanistan's election day defending their main base in the town from almost ceaseless Taleban assaults.

By the time polls closed and the final echoes of air strikes, artillery and gunfire died away, he tells us, barely 500 Afghans had managed to vote in a district of 70,000 people, a number signifying victory for the Taleban's power of fear and intimidation.

"It’s a bad day," Sangin's governor told Loyd. This was Haji Faisal Haq, glowering in anger as the polls closed to the rattle of machinegun fire. "My people were not able to come out and vote. I would never wish a day like this upon them again." "I can't say how they feel about it," he adds, as the deep-throated rip of A-10 cannon fire cut the sky above him. "I don't even know how I feel about it yet."

Nevertheless, Yon refuses to characterise this as a failure of the elections. It was a local setback. We saw the same in Iraq in early 2005, where some people boycotted the elections. The situation here is not good, but this is only one area of Afghanistan. I do not know what happened elsewhere, he concludes.

No such doubts trouble the BBC's Caroline Wyatt, based in Lashkar Gah. Although part of a convoy transporting Helmand governor Gulal Mangal, which suffered an IED and rocket attack, she happily reports: "Violence fails to deter Afghans", adding to the earlier, ludicrous report proclaiming: "Afghan poll hailed a success".

These bizarre reports from the BBC, topping up its refusal to publish any details of the shot-down Chinook – a story to which The Daily Telegraph adds – puts the state broadcaster out on its own in the British media.

AFG+election[i-AFG+election]The Guardian tells us that the Taleban's campaign of violence to disrupt the elections "appeared to have succeeded in discouraging voter turnout in the militant south." Throughout the day, the paper says, Taleban fighters launched sporadic rocket, suicide and bomb attacks that closed scores of election sites. Other polling stations saw only a trickle of voters.

As election officers began the formidable task of counting votes, Afghan government officials said the Taleban had "launched 73 attacks in 15 provinces during the voting, killing at least 26 Afghan civilians and members of the security forces." Only then are we told that, "Despite the violence, president Hamid Karzai – who is hoping for re-election – declared the poll a success."

It seems that Kandahar, the country's second largest city and the Taleban's spiritual home, was one of the worst affected locations: turnout there was estimated to be down 40 percent on the numbers seen voting in 2004's election. Constant rocket attacks had largely discouraged voters. Across the country election officials suggested turnout could be 40-50 percent of the country's 15 million registered voters.

Ben Farmer, based in Kabul, writes for The Daily Telegraph, citing a "western diplomat" who estimated turnout in some parts of the south as low as 10 percent though "average to good" in the north.

A colonel in the Afghan army said voting in the southern border province of Paktika had been confined to town centres. In Helmand, an observer said voting was well below levels seen in the previous presidential election. Zabul, another Pashtun province, was described as "eerily quiet" by one monitor.

Another eye witness, Norine MacDonald, was live blogging for the Afpak Foreign Policy website. She had spent a day touring polling stations. In each she had asked the officials whether the turnout had been at the level they were expecting. All said no, they were overstaffed. Disastrously, the number of women voting was only 25 to 35 percent of the male count, and – confirming the accounts of other witnesses - she conveyed the view from her staff, that in the south that voter turnout had been low and female turnout very low.

Of course, we weren't "there", so we cannot possibly vouch for the truth of what has been going on. But it is also true to say that no one was "there" in the sense that they were able to be physically present in every city, town and village. We are all relying, to a greater or lesser extent, on second-hand reports in order to assess the big picture.

From these emerge a picture totally odds with that presented by the BBC, its view shared only by an increasingly delusional officialdom, stretching from Kabul to London and Washington.

And it is far from over. Andrew Wilder, an Afghanistan expert at the Tufts International Center in Medford, Mass, cautions that it's too early to judge if the elections were a relative success or failure.

Wilder sees the security questions as secondary to the fraud finger-pointing likely to come. "Election day is not really when we should expect the most problems," he says.

light+gun[i-light+gun]He points out that most of the fraud that marred the 2005 presidential election occurred after the polls had closed. "In 2005, parliamentary election day went really smoothly but the real delegitimisation of the election happened during the counting process," he reminds us.

Yet still, on this flawed process, the Western states of the coalition are basing their optimism about the future of Afghanistan. That view can be about as reliable as the BBC reports, which have sunk to a new nadir of corrupt, biased inadequacy. Caroline Wyatt and her fellow BBC hacks may delude themselves that they are reporting "fairly and accurately" but they, like our government, are only deluding themselves.

The last word, however, must go to an artilleryman in besieged Sangin, interviewed by Anthony Loyd. "It's a good day for us," he remarks happily. "It's what we became soldiers for - to shoot at people shooting at us. Beats getting blown up anyway."

COMMENT THREAD

HQUKTF20090720059[i-HQUKTF20090720059]In March 2007, soldier turned journalist Anthony Loyd thought the war in Afghanistan was "winnable". The tide was turning against the Taleban, he wrote.

That was from a man who was "there" and we all accord great respect to those knowing figures who have "been there", as able to divine from their very presence all there is to know about the region they happen to visit.

Well, Anthony Loyd is back "there", in Sangin actually, where on the eve of the presidential election he is reporting the official view that: "Helmand locals too scared of Taleban to vote in presidential election".

There was little to show yesterday, he writes, for the copious expenditure of British money, bullets and blood over the past three years in Sangin. With less than 24 hours to go before the start of voting in Afghanistan's presidential election today the streets were all but empty and the bazaar was, in effect, closed.

Driving through the middle of town with a combined patrol from 3 Company, Welsh Guards, and the Afghan National Army, he saw only two small children and a man on a motorbike. The centre of Sangin resembled an abandoned film set, with even the nearby ferry, usually a lifeline for locals wishing to cross the Helmand river, beached on the shore, the banks abandoned.

The Taleban, who have launched a concerted campaign of intimidation to close Sangin to anyone wishing to vote, fired a handful of mortar rounds into the town soon after midday as a reminder of their presence. The lazy, jackhammer thumping of an Apache helicopter’s 30mm cannon drifted over the day's singing heat in response. For British troops in Sangin's Forward Operating Base Jackson, the day's events ended with an incoming 107mm rocket and the returning clatter of heavy machinegun fire.

The piece is worth reading in its entirety, so we won't repeat it here. But it should be noted that Loyd acknowledges there has been progress. Soldiers no longer have to fight their way out of the gates, he writes. But they die in greater numbers as a result of bombs placed at the edge of Sangin, he adds.

And, one might add, their supply helicopter got shot down so, in addition to the hurried visits by Chinooks, they have also been supplied by a heavily armed convoy. The picture shows the photographic debut of the Panther in Afghanistan, this one driving through Sangin at the head of a section of that convoy.

From the limited view of the backdrop, this does not immediately strike one as a bustling, peaceful metropolis. It rather fits Loyd's description of the town, even if the photograph was taken some days earlier.

Nor, indeed, are the problems confined to Sangin. At the centre of British power, in Lashkar Gah, according to The Independent, the Taleban are blockading the city, threatening potential voters and mining the roads.

Says the paper, the Helmand provincial governor, Gulal Mangal, hoped 75 percent of the province's 800,000 people would vote. But privately, his staff were more realistic. "We'll be lucky if we get 200,000," said a senior official.

In Kajaki, where British troops are helping on a project which will provide electricity, the Taliban has set up a radio station which broadcasts repeated warnings against voting. In Zabul insurgent commanders have commandeered mosques to threaten dire consequences for the election process.

The coalition and the British government have invested a great deal of political and financial capital in these elections, and the process of preparation has cost us a great deal of blood. It is a big gamble, writes Robert Fox in The Guardian.

Of course, we are not "there", so how can we know anything? But we would be willing to gamble that this could be the last throw of the dice. The interesting thing is that, if such a decision is made, it will be made in London, not Kabul or Sangin. And we were "there" once. I can even tell you that the fire extinguishers in No 10 Downing Street did not conform with EU regulations.

COMMENT THREAD

Jungle_Book_Kaa+01[i-Jungle_Book_Kaa+01]There can be no sillier words in the English language (to paraphrase President Reagan quite shamelessly) than the following: "Trust me, I am a politician". Do these people understand that their trustworthiness in most people's eyes is somewhere just below that of second-hand car salesmen? As for estate agents, these hard-working (especially now) boys and girls are paragons of virtue and truthfulness.

Yet, as the boss has pointed out, that is the campaign favoured by at least one of the main political parties and, for all I know, the others will start saying the same soon. Trust in me ..... Surely the Boy-King recalls Disney's "Jungle Book" and the song Kaa, the python, sings to the mesmerized monkeys? It is a very frightening scene, despite, or because of, the inventiveness of the film. In the book the same scene is nightmarish.

All of which reminds me that we have covered the notion of politicians and trust before. Here it is. Enjoy. Nothing has changed.

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