These young people reached their 20s after the fall of the Taliban government. They have no attachment to what it represents or to the antediluvian tribal and patronage structures that shape society on the government side. Indeed they see the two as similar in nature and intimately related. They would wish to be casting their votes on the basis of the policy choices which the candidates put before them. With the honourable exception, again, of Mr Ghani, they have not been presented with such choices. There is a rabble of minor candidates whose only purpose in running is to get a result which they hope to parlay into a job or a business opportunity after the election. Then there are a couple of eccentrics, including the populist and chauvinist Ramazan Bashardost, who wants to take Isfahan back from Iran, one or two others who may achieve respectable percentages of the vote, and Mr Ghani, who still hopes for a breakthrough.
The platforms of Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah, the leading candidates according to the polls, are so generalised as to be almost meaningless. In their election addresses, they leap from platitude to platitude. They scatter promises without including a single detail about implementation. The only exception is on negotiations with the Taliban, where there has been a rather sterile debate on whether local deals or a bargain with the Taliban’s national leadership represent the best approach. The real message the candidates wish to convey is embodied literally in the men who walk by their side – the allies they have secured from each major ethnic group. They want to show that they have put together viable ethnic alliances which will both preclude future conflict and ensure that each ethnicity gets its share of the jobs and money that office will bring. In some areas, the alliance may even discreetly include the local Taliban. The problem is less that this frantic brokering has brought some very unpleasant men closer to power than that neither of the two leading contenders has made any effort to transcend ethnic divisions. Indeed they see those divisions as the building blocks of politics.
Mr Ghani is also a leading candidate, at least in the intellectual sense. But he is a student of underdeveloped and conflict-ridden societies, and knows that ethnic pacts of this kind, between the “big men” of each tribe, reinforce warlordism and virtually guarantee corruption and jobbery. Ethnicity cannot be ignored, he would argue, but it should not be the trump card which it is in Afghanistan today. He has resolutely gone to almost the other extreme, writing a book on how to rescue his country, effectively his campaign manifesto, which concentrates almost exclusively on policy issues. It includes comprehensive plans on everything from the rebuilding of the mining industry and the expansion of education through an improved madrasa system to the possible future export of electricity. This is a vision of an Afghanistan transformed, technocratically directed and strategically organised, which, unfortunately, seems a million miles away from the dusty reality on the ground.