Hamid Karzai’s victory in Afghanistan’s most recent presidential election was so fraught with problems that even the American media took notice. Less attention was paid to the 2004 election, in which Karzai defeated over a dozen opponents under a cloud of allegations concerning irregularities and outright coercion. Frontrunner (out Jan. 26 on DVD ) examines the 2004 race through its most distinctive candidate, a woman, Massouda Jalal.
Aside from the election of Barack Obama, 2008 was a historic race in America for Hillary Clinton, the first woman with a chance at winning the White House. Four years earlier, Jalal ran a credible campaign in a country that had just recently emerged from the nightmare of the Taliban with little history of elevating women in public life. Frontrunner, the documentary by Virginia Williams, follows Jalal on the dusty campaign trail through a devastated land. It suffers only from a paucity of information on Jalal. She was a physician and mother; her husband was an attorney. In the aftermath of 2004 she accepted Karzai’s appointment as minister of women’s affairs. Otherwise, Frontrunner tells us little about her. Where was she during the Taliban time or the Soviet occupation?
Frontrunner’s strength is its allowance for multiple and conflicting points of view—including Karzai, other presidential candidates, UN observers and U.S. officials—within a framework sympathetic to Jalal. Allegations by her supporters that Karzai rigged the 2004 election with the aid of the Bush administration are not implausible.
