Politics & Power Quote by Hamid Karzai

Democracy is pitched here less as an ideal than as a technology: run the procedure properly and legitimacy will start flowing like electricity. Karzai, speaking as a statesman trying to conjure a post-Taliban future into being, leans hard on the mechanics of credibility: "direct, secret ballot", "all over the country". Those are not poetic flourishes; they are assurances aimed at a skeptical audience that had every reason to doubt whether Kabul could represent Kandahar, whether a vote could be safer than a gun, whether national politics could be more than factional bargaining.

The intent is promotional and stabilizing. Karzai is selling the election as a hinge moment that will produce "a lot of difference" and, crucially, "legitimate power". That word choice matters. In a country shaped by warlords, foreign interventions, and contested authority, legitimacy is the scarce resource more valuable than money or weapons. The subtext is a warning, too: without the ritual of a real vote, power will remain improvised and suspect, and implementation will be impossible because no one will accept the state's right to act.

The line also reveals an institutional faith that borders on strategic optimism. "Power to flow with implementation" implies that once the ballot confers consent, governance becomes a matter of executing plans. It downplays the harder reality: legitimacy has to be renewed daily through security, services, and restraint. Still, as rhetoric, it works by turning a complicated nation-building project into a single, graspable promise: give people a secret vote, and the country gains a spine.