Scott Worden, a senior policy adviser on Afghanistan and Pakistan for the U.S. Agency for International Development, said, “These elections are extremely important for Afghanistan, for its future.”

“It’s important to get them right,” Worden told an audience at USIP on April 5. “From the U.S. side, we are strongly committed to supporting inclusive, transparent, and credible Afghan elections.”

Experts at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) have said the landmark presidential election scheduled for April 5, 2014, is likely to determine the country’s future to a greater extent even than the topic that tends to consume discussion of Afghanistan in Washington -- how many American troops will stay behind once most of the NATO-led coalition withdraws at the end of 2014.

A new government legitimately elected with widespread support would significantly ease the way for economic development, a potential peace agreement with the Taliban and assurances that Afghanistan doesn’t again become a haven for terrorists as it was for al-Qaida before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S.

U.S. officials confront the challenge of emphasizing the importance of next year’s election without giving the impression of undue interference, said Andrew Wilder, director of Afghanistan and Pakistan programs at USIP.

“It’s very easy to be skeptical about” the political transition, Wilder said. “The challenges of holding credible elections actually pale in comparison to the … consequences of an illegitimate holding-on to power in Afghanistan or an illegitimate transfer of power.”

Wilder and civic advocate Ahmad Nader Nadery expressed cautious optimism that political players, civil society groups and business leaders in Afghanistan are aware of the potential consequences of a flawed election and determined to press for a legitimate process and help make it happen.

“If Afghans make that political transition, they are gradually and slowly going to walk on the right path of history,” said Nadery, a former member of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. He is founder and executive chairman of the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan. “It will enable them to stand on their own feet.”

The obstacles are formidable. With the onset of warmer weather, the fighting season has begun. On April 5 alone, suicide bombers stormed a courthouse in the western Farah Province and killed at least 53 people, including 34 civilians.

Afghan civic and business leaders also worry that the U.S. and other nations that have supported the country since American forces toppled the Taliban regime in late 2001 are losing interest. U.S. and Afghan government officials still haven’t been able to reach a security agreement on residual American forces after 2014.

Scott Smith, deputy director of Afghanistan and Pakistan programs at USIP, said slow movement in Washington to support the 2014 election seems to stem in large part from a prevailing misperception of what happened during the last presidential balloting in 2009. He takes issue with sweeping interpretations that President Hamid Karzai engineered a massively fraudulent election in 2009 to secure another term and that the international community and Afghan institutions were unwilling or incapable of ensuring a legitimate vote.

In fact, much of the fraud committed in Karzai’s name was probably not based on his direct orders, but organized by lower level officials whose jobs depended on Karzai. Far from the fraud being tolerated, more than a million fraudulent votes were removed from the final count, bringing Karzai below 50 percent support.

Ultimately, the crisis was resolved through the legal Afghan institutions, said Smith who was the senior special assistant to Kai Eide, the special representative of the United Nations secretary-general in Kabul at the time.  This process was “ugly” Smith said, but in the end it allowed a politically acceptable result and preserved the constitutional order. He appealed for “a little bit of patience with this early democracy.”

This time around, disagreements and delays in parliamentary approval of a new electoral law that would govern the Independent Election Commission and critical electoral complaints procedures have hampered preparations for next year’s election.

Failure to adopt a law would leave it to Karzai to issue a decree, which most likely would “undermine that sense of democratic participation and the role of the legislature at this critical time,” Nadery said. Such a move also would cast further doubt over the legitimacy of the Independent Election Commission. Voter registration already has been delayed as a result, further heightening suspicion among political parties.

But while the news from Afghanistan seems overwhelmingly negative, “it is not all doom and gloom,” said Nadery, who represented Afghan youth activists at the United Nations-sponsored peace talks for Afghanistan at Bonn, Germany in 2001. He is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Fragile States.

“The discussion about the presidential election itself is now a dominant part of the public discourse,” Nadery said. “You go to any average Afghan gathering, the first thing discussed is the election and who’s going to be the next president and what kind of agenda that president will have, how different that next administration will be from the current administration, what are the challenges.”

Political parties are moving away from the focus on a single figurehead in the elections to discussing how to form real teams of party officials who can develop agendas and party platforms. Some forces close to Karzai are showing signs of independence, Nadery said.

Youth groups are getting more and more active, not only on their own specific or local issues but politically at a broader level, Nadery said. Hossai Wardak, an Afghanistan senior expert at USIP, agreed, saying she has seen encouraging signs of youth activists playing a neutral and constructive role on electoral issues. That’s crucial, Worden said, because young people are most likely to brave potential violence to campaign and go to the polls, giving them outsized influence.

Civil society groups have planned an open letter to the Afghan Parliament urging members to take action on the electoral law, said Wardak, who serves as deputy director of the Afghan nonprofit Equality for Peace and Democracy.

James DeHart, director of the U.S. State Department’s Office for Afghanistan, said at a USIP event in December that legitimate elections would determine financial support that the U.S. and other nations will provide after 2014.

The U.S. is monitoring the electoral process for four “key factors” necessary to generate credible results, said Worden, formerly a senior rule-of-law adviser at USIP, in the panel discussion this month:

• Election laws passed by the parliament to demonstrate consensus on rules of the game.
• Credible institutions including the Independent Elections Commission.
• An impartial electoral complaints process.
• An operational plan that will inspire confidence with greater public participation, especially among women, as well as markedly less fraud than in the past and provisions for domestic observation of the vote to guard against irregularities. 

Of Afghanistan’s population of more than 30 million, about half may be voting age, but participation in elections has dropped from 7 million in 2004 to less than 4 million in 2010, Worden said.

“You want to have a leader come out with a strong popular mandate,” Worden said.

That will require not only physical security to ensure voters of their safety, but also confidence in the results. With the term expiring this month for the chairman of the Independent Election Commission, “there’s a big decision coming up,” Worden said. The next chairman must be a “credible individual who’s respected and qualified” and selected through a legitimate process with broad consultations.

“How Afghans view the commissioners themselves and the chairperson in particular really sets the tone for whether they are supportive of the decisions that the IEC makes or not,” Worden said.

A legitimate election complaints process also will be key, he said. In both the 2009 presidential elections and the 2010 parliamentary elections, the key decisions on the outcome were made in the complaints process, he said. There is no Electoral Complaints Commission now, and laws conflict on how such a body should be structured.

“Establishing a mechanism that is credible, that can act impartially and competently, is very important,” Worden said.

The U.S. also is watching for steps that ensure women can more effectively run for office, conduct campaigns and help manage the electoral process.

“One key that we’ve found in past elections is that women’s participation depends in part on are there women involved in administration of the elections,” Worden said.

Greater confidence in the electoral process also might encourage more willingness to compromise politically and address all the issues the country will face in the future, he said.