Florida-Style Vote For Afghanistan?

The site Rediff.com has a good piece today on the Presidential elections coming up next month in Afghanistan, focusing on the issues and on one of the main challengers to incumbent Hamid Karzai, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah. Karzai is fairly unpopular these days, many Afghans are frustrated with his government's failure to provide the development projects they've promised, fight rampant corruption, or to deal with the booming trade in opium (that last one's tough since Karzai's brother is said to be one of the country's biggest drug lords).

But even though people are fed up with Karzai, he's still favored to win the August 20th vote, and now our man in Kabul, special envoy Richard Holbrooke, is warning that next month's election will be "imperfect." He goes on to apparently suggest the vote could be like Florida in 2000 - " I am an American who lived through an imperfect election eight years ago. I am not going to hold Afghanistan to standards which even the United States does not achieve," Holbrooke said.

So that begs the question how much imperfection will we think is ok? Meanwhile, some analysts are worried that the biggest problem with the election will be an extremely low turnout. Since Afghanistan is split among several ethnic groups and Karzai is a Pashtun, the largest and historically most dominant one, the fear is that if Karzai doesn't win with broad support from Afghanistan's other ethnic minorities, he won't be viewed as a legitimate president.

With that in mind, maybe Holbrooke should be pushing the Afghans a little harder to make sure they get their election right.