On Tue, 18 Aug 2009, Michael McIntyre wrote:
> It's a funny old world. I'm scheduled to go on Fox News (just
> Chicago, I think) tomorrow at 8:25 a.m. for a three-minute live
> interview on the upcoming elections in Afghanistan. I'm going to try
> to make three quick points in three minutes.
> (1) Any disruption of the election will probably take place out of the
> range of U.S. cameras, so this will appear to be a successful
> election.
> (2) Voting will probably follow patronage, so the U.S. client should
> do well in the election.
> (3) Aside from its propaganda value, directed at U.S. citizens, this
> election won't matter a damn.
>
> Anything else anyone thinks I should try to say, given this venue and
> time constraint?
Those are pretty strong constraints, so limiting your points and repeating them seems like the only idea.
Assuming your main point is that the election is a farce, here are some colorful items:
1) This is one of the rare places where the fraud is done so openly it's already been extensively documented before the election takes place. To start with, there are now more voters registered than there are eligible people. Secondly (and this kind of drips with irony, since "freeing the women" was one of the US's favorite banners), in super conservative districts in Pashtunistan, where women have virtually no rights, there are twice as many women registered as men. This doesn't happen anywhere else. The goal seems to be to allow the male leaders of the clan-households to vote their votes by proxy, thus multiplying the votes of Karzai's supporters by 5 or 10 fold:
http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/observers-see-pattern-of-114528.html
2) Karzai, who has been running scared lately vs. Abdullah Abdullah, just brought the notorious Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostam back from exile to campaign for him in his old Uzbek territory:
http://www.juancole.com/2009/08/obama-defends-afghanistan-war.html
This is the guy who was famous for killing people by rolling tanks over them. If you have Ahmed Rashid's book _Taliban_ handy, you can find other colorful anecdotes.
Michael