WHEN Haji Faqirullah, the malik (head) of Korak Dana village, decided to marry off all five of his grandsons in one ceremony last year, there was an outcry in the community.
“People were shocked,” he laughed. “They were all complaining: that means you feed us only once instead of five times.”
That was exactly the point. Sitting in the shade of some mulberry trees, Faqirullah runs his fingers through his long white beard and plays with a mobile phone as he explains: “I was fed up with seeing everyone in my village bankrupted by weddings and wanted to set an example.”
High on the Shomali plains north of Kabul, in a landscape dominated by the snow-topped Hindu Kush mountains, Korak Dana is poor but extremely beautiful. Streams run through lush fields of green grapes, men wobble along stony lanes on donkeys and bicycles and women in blue burqas flit between the mudwalled compounds.
Like much of Afghanistan it has seen decades of war, first against the Russians, then different mujaheddin groups and lastly the Taliban. At one point Faqirullah led the entire village on a 17-hour exodus to the Panjshir valley during which several elders and children drowned crossing a river.
Today, far from the south and east of the country, where the Taliban have returned, the villagers want to move on from their troubled past.
Afghanistan will vote next month in its second presidential election since the Taliban were ousted eight years ago. In villages such as Korak Dana, with entrenched tribal traditions, notions of modern democracy may seem remote. Faqirullah says the elders have met several times to discuss how to vote and women tell me they will cast their ballots as instructed by their men.
Although only 90 minutes’ drive from Kabul, the village is still waiting for the government to build a road, bring electricity or open a factory that could give work to their young men. Meanwhile, it is the villagers who are making changes.
Ainuddin, the local teacher, leads me inside a low building and smiles at my astonishment as we enter a magical room of light and letters. Every inch of the mud walls is plastered with papers covered in drawing and writing, and more flutter from the ceiling.
For $100 (£60) a month provided by the charity Habitat for Humanity, he has made it his mission to teach the villagers to read and write. Fifty illiterate men and women attend his classes. Muhammad Mahfouz, 28, who never went to school because of war, walks four miles each way. “An illiterate is like a blind man,” he said. “I want to read so I can solve my problems for myself.”
An even more radical departure is the end of costly weddings. “The poorest family would spend $6,000 minimum on the marriage of a son,” said one woman, Parwin. “Imagine, some of us have five sons. All the time we were selling land and borrowing money to pay.”
Faqirullah said the village had been falling apart. “We had this crazy situation where the day after the wedding the bride would be left sitting alone in the house while her husband went off to Iran to work to pay for it all.”
Encouraged by female Afghan lawyers from the Women and Children Legal Resource Foundation, Faqirullah led the way in showing there was no shame in modest weddings.
Now villagers hold tea parties for the betrothed instead of banquets with rice and goat meat, or join together in mass weddings. All agree this simple step is making more difference to their lives than anything since the end of the Taliban.
While villagers such as these want to move on, the country’s leaders seem wedded to the past. Kabul is dominated by giant billboards from which the face of President Hamid Karzai stares out next to the brutish features of Marshal Mohammed Qasim Fahim, the Tajik former warlord he has chosen as his running-mate.
Fahim was blamed in a Human Rights Watch report in 2005 for “systematic human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law” such as murdering prisoners of war in the 1990s.
The president has also secured the support of General Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek warlord known for running over his enemies with tanks.
Ordinary Afghans and the international community are horrified by the reemergence of such figures. Among the most vocal in protesting to the president was Kai Eide, the top United Nations official in Afghanistan.
“We need more competent politicians and fewer warlords,” he said. “There’s been a very significant improvement in government over the past seven or eight months with some new reformist ministers and we don’t want to lose that.”
Although Karzai used to blame the warlords for the destruction in Afghanistan, supporters say he has had little alternative but to work with them.
Prince Ali Siraj, the grandson of one king and the great-nephew of another, sits in a house full of black-and-white photographs of his illustrious ancestors.
“The most important thing Karzai has done is keep this country together,” he said. “He has to make deals with strong men to avoid breaking Afghanistan into north and south.”
This election is far more hotly contested than the last in 2004. Then, there was no doubt about the victory of Karzai, who had been installed as interim president by the West.
The international community and local population now seem equally disenchanted. A poll in May showed Karzai’s support was down from 55% to 31%, although the next highest candidate scored only 7%.
To ensure reelection, Karzai has had to turn to regional powerbrokers. “Dostum got 1.2m votes in the last election,” said the president’s elder brother Mahmoud Karzai, a businessman who is running his campaign. “We can’t ignore that.”
To the fury of his international backers, Karzai also pardoned one of Afghanistan’s few convicted heroin traffickers because he came from a powerful family.
“I prefer to call it forgiving, not pardoning,” Karzai told The Sunday Times. “It’s giving a new chance to someone whose
family has made many sacrifices for this country.”
Although it is hard to find anyone in Kabul who says they will vote for Karzai, most expect him to win because of support from his fellow Pashtuns, the largest ethnic group. He has been helped by the failure of the opposition to unite behind one candidate. There are 41 candidates, most of whom have no hope. Two are women, one a psychiatrist and the other the widow of a murdered aviation minister.
The 51-year-old president’s main challengers are two former ministers, Dr Abdullah Abdullah, 49, an ophthalmologist and former foreign minister, and Ashraf Ghani, a 60-year-old academic and former finance minister.
Both took part in the country’s first presidential debate last Thursday, broadcast by the private Tolo network on radio and television. An empty podium stood between them after Karzai refused to take part in the discussion.
“He didn’t want to favour one channel,” said his brother. Others said he was scared.
Ghani came over better in the debate, helped by advice from James Carville, the US strategist who oversaw the election of President Bill Clinton in 1992.
Aiming to attract the votes of young people – about two-thirds of the population is under 25 – he promised to create 1m jobs and provide wider access to education.
Support is mounting for Abdullah, however. He is well known for his past in the mujaheddin, who fought the Soviet occupation.
Among his backers is Karzai’s uncle, Asadullah Wasafi, one of the country’s most respected tribal elders. “It’s because Karzai is my nephew that I know he’s not capable,” he said.
The biggest challenge is making sure the election happens. In the Election Commission office in Kabul, British-printed ballot papers are being sent to 7,000 polling stations. Thousands of donkeys have been hired to reach remote areas.
With security worsening in the face of an increasingly powerful Taliban insurgency, the big question mark is voter turnout, particularly in the southern Pashtun region. According to the latest UN security map, 164 of Afghanistan’s 378 districts are highly unsafe. In May, for the first time, the number of violent incidents in a month passed 1,000.
General Karl Eikenberry, the former US commander in Afghanistan who recently returned as ambassador, said he was optimistic: “In spite of all the challenges, think about Afghanistan 10 or 20 years ago, when differences were being settled by Katyusha rockets fired into Kabul and tens of thousands of innocent civilians slaughtered, and here we are, the next president of Afghanistan being decided by open political debate.”