Afghanistan: The problem with ethnicity

Interesting piece in The Christian Science Monitor yesterday about how voting during the recent presidential election in Afghanistan fell along ethnic lines.  Maps reproduced below.

The article states: “Afghans themselves have been conditioned through bloody history to deny the legitimacy of ethnic divisions. Political leaders avoid overt appeals to ethnicity, and ordinary Afghans will often deny that clannish behavior is linked to ethnicity. . . Still, the voting patterns call into question how cohesive Afghanistan has become. Aside from some educated urbanites, the country appears divided into regional ethnic enclaves committed more to self-preservation than to sacrifice for the nation.”

A couple of interesting things to note about this situation: the voting system that was chosen in Afghanistan post-Bonn was that of Single Non-Transferable Voting (SNTV), a rarely-used system that permits individuals to stand for elections only as independent candidates and not as members of a party list. This discourages the formation of political parties.  In an ethnically divided nation such as Afghanistan, many policy-makers feared that political parties would form along ethnic and religious lines, their presence, thereby, working merely to exacerbate existing societal tension and sectarian strife. Case studies of post-conflict situations have suggested that, particularly in situations where ethnic divides overlap with unequal distribution of economic resources, the presence of political parties can, in fact, harden existing cleavages.

Still, as political parties have been formally excluded from the political system, elites and power-brokers from previous eras have continued to dominate the political scene in Afghanistan. In this way, the existing system has not so much dissuaded the creation of political parties as it has worked to strengthen existing factions and benefited armed factions-turned-parties, mostly led by warlords. And now, as these maps demonstrate, they’ve hardly worked in preventing association along ethnic lines either.

This also raises an interesting question about whether voting along ethnic lines is inherently a bad thing. In his compelling work Votes and Violence, Wilkinson argues that the greater the level of party competition in a region, the greater the incentives to appeal to minority votes, especially when victory depends on votes from the margins. This is particularly the case when the minority group is large enough to count politically – as is the case with Muslims in India, and with most of the ethnic and sectarian groups in Afghanistan. Of course, this argument requires the presence of moderates in the leadership and electorate-at-large and works most effectively when operating in a Single Transferrable Vote or Alternative Vote system. Nonetheless, it demonstrates that ethnically heterogeneous societies and parties formed along ethnic lines do not necessarily imply greater levels of ethnic discontent and division, and could work towards the greater goal of democracy. As Wilkinson argues, “politicized ethnicity depends on a whole range of factors, such as federal boundaries and government policies, and not just on underlying census categories.”