Karzai is right, but O’Hanlon is wrong

Michael O’Hanlon in The National Interest suggests that the Parliamentary election results from September need to be corrected because security conditions prevented Pashtuns from voting. Citing President Karzai’s concerns, which have caused him to postpone convening parliament, Michael proposes two possible fixes:

One would be to seat all 249 of the members who just won seats according to official tallies (including about 100 Pashtuns, less than their share of the population and less than their 115 seats previously held), but add in some seats on an ad hoc basis for those Pashtun parts of the country like Ghazni that lost representation in the recent voting. A respected group would need to be charged with this task, and no more than ten to fifteen additonal seats should be created as a result, but the fix might otherwise work. A second approach would be to convene a shura in Ghazni to create a balanced provincial delegation—effectively discarding the results of the election for that province only (and, again, perhaps one or two others if truly needed).

Now I can agree with President Karzai and Michael that the lack of representation from Pashtun areas is a problem, but I don’t really think either of his suggested fixes is going to work: either they will alter the political balance in Parliament, in which case the non-Pashtuns will object, or they will not, in which case Karzai will not be satisfied.

In addition to the power balance, there is an issue of democratic legitimacy.  Something similar to what Michael proposes was tried in Iraq in 2005, in order to compensate for the lack of Sunni votes (due both to boycott and security conditions) and resulting representation.  Sunni members were added to the committee preparing the new constitution, which quickly decided to ignore their input, meet without them present, and proceed with a constitution inimical to Sunni interests.  I imagine the U.S. Congress would also react badly if someone proposed adding members to represent the 50 per cent or so of Americans who don’t vote.

The time for Pashtuns to fix this problem was election day, by making the efforts required to ensure security and to go to the polls.  The fact that they failed to do so is certainly a problem for Karzai, who already tried to fix it by stuffing the ballot boxes.  The kind of post-facto fixes that Michael is proposing will only undermine the integrity of the electoral process and encourage many others to ask for corrections–surely there were security problems in non-Pashtun majority areas as well.  It will also validate the already strong Afghan tendency to believe that your own ethnic group cannot be represented by someone of another ethnic group.

Why wouldn’t it be better to ask Karzai to govern with a parliament not altogether to his liking?  That is what you get in a lot of democratic systems (especially presidential ones), including our own.  And Ghazni’s largely Hazara parliament members won’t have much of a chance of getting reelected unless they begin to take the concerns of their Pashtun constituents seriously, because next time they’ll make the effort to vote.