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He doesn’t travel with a platoon of heavily armed security men. He is not financed by carpetbaggers and war profiteers, or heroin khans and land-grabbers linked with the Presidential Palace. And his candidacy isn’t given much of a chance by officials at Kabul’s foreign embassies.
Yet in at least one crucial way Ramazan Bashardost, Member of Parliament, stands tall among the 40-plus candidates vying for Afghanistan’s top job in this summer’s presidential election. He’s on the record as one of the first and most consistent critics of the corruption-wracked Western-backed Karzai regime.
More than two years ago, the popular 44-year-old Kabul MP and former Planning Minister didn’t mince words when asked by skyreporter whether Hamid Karzai’s foreign sponsors could do more to combat corruption.
“The international community can say to Mr. Karzai: ‘it is our money, our people pay a lot of tax to help you, and this money is for reconstruction in Afghanistan.
“It is not so that some high Afghan authority becomes very rich, and the other Afghan people become more poor.’”
(For the full story, see “Kabul’s Fat Cats,” first posted March 9th, 2007, on page 23 of Recent Stories. Or follow the link http://skyreporter.com/blog/20070309_01/
In our Nov. 2007 article Cashing In On Karzai & Co. for Canada’s public policy institute, the IRPP, Bashardost was even more outspoken.
“The Afghan government is completely corrupted. The internal and external mafia should be totally removed. The authorities should be replaced by those real Afghans who believe in national benefits, human rights and democracy not only as political philosophy but as a philosophy of life.”
Bashardost took particular exception to the U.S. Defense Department awarding tens of millions of dollars in contracts to Hamed Wardak, the son of Karzai’s hard-drinking, under-achieving Defence Minister, Rahim Wardak.
“The United States and other western countries are not following their own laws. It is obvious to everyone that the contracts go to a minister's son or brother. You cannot get a contract unless you have connections.”
Sadly, neither the Bush administration nor any of its international allies acted on warnings such as these.
Belatedly, last year, the Americans tried to distance themselves from the crumbling House of Karzai, only to have the embattled Afghan president retaliate by openly allying himself with some of the most reviled strongmen in Kabul and across the country. Now Karzai is favored to win the August 20th vote.
Once Washington’s chosen one, Hamid Karzai has come full circle as yet another embodiment of blowback, the perpetual by-product of U.S. policies on Afghanistan and Pakistan, from the Reagan years through to the present.
Despite these gloomy realities, and the substantial odds against him, Ramazan Bashardost is undeterred. He receives visitors at his campaign headquarters – a tent, as has been his custom from the start - answering questions from voters and foreign journalists in an open, forthright manner.
It’s a sharp contrast to the self-styled “leading” challenger to Karzai, the prickly, some say volcanic academic, Ashraf Ghani.
Like Bashardost, Ghani was once one of Karzai’s ministers. But the similarities end there: Ghani would appear to have one of the best-bankrolled campaigns in the race.
Attempting, of late, to distance himself from the American component of his former dual citizenship (he surrendered his U.S. passport prior to registering as a candidate in Kabul last month) Ghani is reluctant to answer questions about his years among the newly-wealthy Afghan-American business community in Washington DC.
On April 3rd, skyreporter sent Ashraf Ghani an email containing five questions about his past. Mr. Ghani’s response was a terse message stating: “THIS IS NOW A LEGAL MATTER…” (his capitals), and featuring the name of an extremely costly law firm – based in Britain, not Afghanistan.
One of skyreporter’s questions referred to a matter Mr. Ghani has defended at some length on his own campaign website, namely his handling, while he was President Karzai’s Minister of Finance from 2002-2004, of funds from the Asian Development Bank. Questions regarding these transactions were raised in a rather unpleasant way by the president’s brother, Mahmoud Karzai.
Against this bleak and contentious background, the presidential election campaign is now officially underway.
There is nothing resembling what generals and overpaid private contractors like to call the "security situation," only varying degrees of insecurity. At least two candidates for August’s provincial elections have been murdered in recent weeks.
The 2009 presidential vote stands to be a much bloodier affair than either of Afghanistan’s debut exercises in representative democracy, the presidential contest of 2004 and its parliamentary counterpart the following year.
And at this late date, after seven years of incompetent Western stewardship, no amount of lawyers, guns and money can change that.
