The current winner-takes-all presidential system has proven problematic for a multi-ethnic country like Afghanistan. Perhaps parliamentary system is the better alternative.
A day before the dual presidential inaugurals in Kabul, the US peace envoy for Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad had a last-minute inconsequential meeting with one of the two claimants to the presidency, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, to change his mind. Details of which were shared by Hasht-I Subh, an Afghan newspaper.
Khalilzad’s approach to end the current standoff between Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani, the incumbent and president-elect who has already taken the oath of the highest office for the second term, follows an oft-repeated method that papers the cracks but leaves the underlying systemic reason untouched – what keeps causing problems in the first place.
In the meeting, Mr. Khalilzad has set out a plan to Mr. Abdullah who was declared loser in the elections by the Independent Election Commission (IEC).
The plan, laid out in bullet points, includes some concessions for Mr. Abdullah, such as the right to appoint one member of the influential National Security Council, recommend 40 percent of the government cabinet from among his team – subject to approval by the President and a parliamentary vote – besides heading the largely symbolic Supreme Peace Council.
The problem is not in the detail of these proposals or the fact that Mr. Abdullah, as shown by his decision to go ahead with his inauguration, may never accept them. It is in the habit of seeking quick-fixes that is hastily devised each time an election goes wrong in Afghanistan.
This is when the root of the problem lies in the current winner-takes-all presidential system.
The system is premised on the exclusion of the losing candidate, but conciliatory steps can be accommodated by the winning candidate. So far, to avoid outright upheaval, the winner has been persuaded to do so, by the US secretary of state John Kerry in 2014-15 and now seemingly by Mr. Khalilzad.
Otherwise, it hands over the winner the right to head all the three branches of the state. The president in this system not only leads the executive but is also the head of the Supreme Court – whose chief justice(s) he appoints – and the head of the legislative branch. She/He handpicks the head of the Central Bank and appoints all the provincial governors and handles every detail of governance in the country from its capital, Kabul. She/He, in other words, reigns like a king in all but name.
Most controversially, (s)he appoints the head of the election commission and selects its members after personally interviewing them. Members of the commission that declared Mr. Ghani winner in the recent elections, for instance, were all picked by him. To think that this won’t result in concerns due to conflict of interest is dangerously wishful. And, who would think that the incumbent might not try to prolong her/his term, or side with her/his favorite candidate in future elections by abusing this power.
Meanwhile, political opposition in this system is confined to voicing its concerns in the media – which is a mug’s game and largely ineffectual – and has no tangible means to push through its agenda. It is unappealing and toothless. Being in the opposition is being thrown into cold political obscurity.
In early post-2001, it was widely believed among the foreign and domestic stakeholders in debates to map out the post-T Afghan politics and society that a parliamentary system was better suited for multi-ethnic Afghanistan.
Details of this pivotal period and the role different parties played are covered exhaustively in a book by Scott Smith, a United Nations official who worked in Afghanistan in those days. According to his account, the choice between parliamentary and presidential systems was long viewed settled, given that international practice historically favored a parliamentary system for countries with the demographics of Afghanistan. It came as a surprise, he says, that a presidential system was forced on the country at the last minute.
Based on Mr. Khalilzad’s account of the same episode in his memoir – he was US President George W. Bush’s Special Envoy back then – a presidential system for the country had his support because war-torn Afghanistan to his opinion required a centralized and strong executive during its post-conflict reconstruction. Curiously, this wasn’t the system he preferred for war-torn Iraq because of it being multi-ethnic and multi-religious, when he later worked there as US ambassador.
Traditionally favored by Pashtuns, the centralized presidential system is viewed negatively by other major Afghan ethnic groups, Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks, whose leaders have now coalesced around Mr. Abdullah following the recent electoral stalemate.
Mr. Khalilzad is not seen as totally impartial given that he himself is an Afghan-born Pashtun, and has shown unflinchingly to want to preserve the current presidential system in his list of proposals in his meeting with Mr. Abdullah, with all the three branches of state under the leadership of the president as the “head of state”.
The list has no place for the post of the chief executive, the post Mr. Abdullah held under the previous National Unity Government which reduced concentration of power to some extent. If anything, Mr. Khalilzad wants to make Afghanistan more centralized.
Presidential system has seriously eroded public confidence in representative democracy – seen in abysmal voter turn-out with each passing election – due to the disappointing squabbles it has led to following the announcement of results. There is no reason to believe such disastrous contentions won’t repeat in future elections as well.
Parliamentary system, in contrast, guarantees some representation by different ethnic and religious groups, either in the executive or within a meaningful parliamentary role, which can dissuade the sense of exclusion that the current system is bound to generate with each round of elections. What Mr. Khalilzad could do, instead of a list of demands asking for unconditional submission of Mr. Abdullah to his wishes and a Ghani presidency, was to propose a strict timeline for constitutional reforms and ask the international community to make assistance to Mr. Ghani’s government conditional to implementing it.
However, such a solution has proven beyond Mr. Khalilzad and Mr. Ghani’s combined capacities to genuinely consider as an alternative. Mr. Abdullah’s move to declare himself the president, although unclear where it might lead to, might be the steadfast resolve the country needs to bring the needed reforms.
(Kambaiz Rafi is a political economy analyst and researcher. He is currently a PhD Candidate at Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London. Views expressed are personal.)
