Kabul — I knew I would regret voting.
First off, I have no identity issues about my hyphenated nationality. I was recently called a “foreign Afghan” (khariji afghan-ul-‘asl) by the Ministry of Information and Culture — it was a pithy effort to undermine me, and therefore the credibility of an electoral media monitoring project that I manage that has been critical of the state media.
Yesterday, a colleague who noticed my ink-stained finger asked why I don’t respond to the minister and prove him wrong. I have nothing to prove. I am an Afghan. I was born here. My mother, my grandmothers and great-grandmothers were born here. Apart from my mother, these women did not learn to read and write, and they gave birth to generations in their homes, placing their faith in God and the women around them. So I don’t lose sleep over the minister’s lackeys trying to define who I am.
I registered for a voter card in 2004, before the first presidential election when I worked as a journalism trainer and freelance reporter during a summer break from graduate school. I dug it out months ago just to see if I still had it, and then I misplaced it in a stack of books. I didn’t plan on voting. I was going to be tied up in the office with the media monitoring, and all the paranoia about polling station security made voting a non-issue.
At the last moment, in a surge of my own ever-present naivety and optimism, I voted. Part of it was the reporter in me. How can I not see a polling station during a historical election? Part of it was the woman in me. What if my children ask me where I was during the 2009 presidential election? And part of it was my sense of civic responsibility. After all, I even voted in California county and state elections.
I went to Lycee Zarghoona, an all-girl’s high school around the corner from my rented home. The polling station was nearly empty. When I entered the women’s voting area, there was only one other voter in the room, a middle-aged woman who bravely took a provincial council ballot as well (there were more than 300 candidates in Kabul, and the ballot was stapled together like an oversized booklet).
A teenage poll worker dipped my finger into the disputed indelible ink and another handed me a folded presidential ballot. Once inside the booth, I didn’t linger. Candidate, check.
Today, two days after the election, I’m asking myself, why did I vote? I don’t believe in national myths, even if those myths are necessary. I don’t believe that people power rests in voting. In fact, I believe that after the armed revolution or peaceful resistance, the dream dies and reality, that is to say corruption and compromise, follow. And that’s not pessimistic. The struggle and conflict is the romance and the rest is human nature.
Plus, this is no organic democracy, thought that’s irrelevant, as the International Community claims. It’s an imperfect vote in an obviously imperfect country, and free and fair is relative. One could write an entire book about Orientalism & the Afghan elections.
Meanwhile, many Afghans will just continue to call democracy, “da-mor-kussy,” which is not a quaint Afghan pronunciation. It means, literally, your mom’s (blank) in Pashto.
So while I don’t have an identity issue, I have contradiction issues. I don’t believe that voting will bring change to Afghanistan, or at least the kind of changes that are absolutely necessary now. Afghans are keen politicians, but the political machinations taking place now are sad, like a baser version of a Shakespearean play. To be unorthodox is impossible in Afghanistan. To be, God forbid, independent is foolish. To be conniving and clever, in contrast, is smart.
So in an election where voter cards were bought, traded and fabricated (Britney Jamilah Spears’ voter card, resident of Kandahar, comes to mind), and where ballot stuffing existed, and where the only plausible rival wears Armani suits that cost more than an average Afghan’s annual income, what was the point? Did I participate in a farce, or did I participate in an event that in the long term will be (mis)labeled as revolutionary? Both prospects depress me.
