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The Afghan Miracle


By WILLIAM SAFIRE

Published: October 6, 2004

Let's not be taken in when defeatists try to pooh-pooh the promise of this week's election in Afghanistan.

Already the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe - more insecure and uncooperative than usual - has announced that it will refuse to declare this coming election to be free and fair. European nit-picking about "irregularities" will be fierce from high-minded bureaucrats who do not realize that the most irregular thing in that part of the world is anything approximating a free election.

Too much world media coverage will focus on pictures of violence at polling places, not on the big news: lines of courageous Afghans patiently waiting to vote. Tinhorn despots are passing out leaflets in refugee camps promising divine rewards to anyone who kills a poll worker.

Such terrorist acts by die-hard Taliban insurgents may be excitingly pictorial, but images of Muslims, especially women, voting for the first time - and of candidates for office literally taking their lives in their hands to campaign - are deemed not sufficiently mesmerizing.

Another reason to downplay or dismiss Election Day in Afghanistan is that it is clearly good news for America and its allies, who are directly responsible for this outbreak of freedom in a Muslim land.

If the mountain people of this war-ravaged nation, whose cash crop is poppies for illegal opium, can stand up to their tormentors and grasp the powers of democracy, their example will offer hope to the better-educated Iraqis sitting on their nation's sea of oil. Afghanistan would be the first good domino to tip over.

When the Afghan president Hamid Karzai visited here a few months ago, he told us of his hopes to persuade some 7 million of the 10 million eligible Afghan voters to register. He underestimated his people's hunger for representative government: despite threats to registration centers, and in the face of assassination attempts on the lives of candidates, over 10 million Afghans have registered, plus 2 million more in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran.

That's a political miracle. ...continued

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/06/opinion/06safi.html?oref=login&oref=login


Only a few days away now. America can be proud of what we have accomplished in Afganistan. It will be a very powerful symbol to see the women voting in an area of the world that women have so few rights.

[JCBoston]

Chalk up another one for America's finest.
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"Today we did what we had to do. They counted on America to be passive. They counted wrong."~Ronald Reagan

[Navy_Navy_Navy]

Democracy - coming soon to a country in the Middle East.

Courtesy of the coalition of free people of the world who care about those who are not.

Great article - thanks!
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~ Echo Juliet ~
Altering course to starboard - On Fire, Keep Clear
Navy woman, Navy wife, Navy mother