men with bachelor degrees. so equal pay for equal work is not only an issue of equity, it is also -- has real economic consequences. families rely on women's income. data analyzed by the national partnership for women and families showed that mothers are the primary or sole breadwinners in nearly 40% of families. if we eliminate gender discrimination in pay in rhode island, a working woman would have enough extra money to buy 74 more weeks of food for her family, make six more months of mortgage and utility payments, or pay 11 more months of rent. and that just doesn't help the woman, it helps the family. one of the best tools in fighting poverty is to close the pay gap. the paycheck fairness act will help fulfill the promise of equal pay by improving the remedies available to women facing gender discrimination. these are commonsense and fair improvements. for our mothers, our daughters,

our sisters, our fathers and sons and brothers, we must pass the paycheck fairness act. we believe everyone deserves a fair shot. that includes equal pay for equal work. i urge my colleagues to come together and pass the paycheck fairness act. and with that >> you can watch newsmakers at 10:00 and 6:00 eastern on c-span. a week ago, afghan voters went to the polls in the presidential elections in the first-ever democratic transfer of power and afghanistan's history. it could take up to six weeks to tally results. former afghan ambassador to

canada and france discussed the election. this is an hour. >> thank you all for coming. as you know, the elections took place on saturday, and our panel will discuss what we know so far and what the consequences and likelihood of those elections are likely to be. i am the executive director of the partnership for secure america, and we are proud and happy to cosponsor this panel with the alliance in support of the afghan people, asap. the alliance itself is a group of individuals who are in a coalition dedicated to support the progress made by the afghan people over the last decade. the psa partnership for secure america was an organization

founded in 2005 dedicated to the idea that we ought to promote fact-based, bipartisan approach to foreign-policy and national security. over the years we have issued a statement on key policy issues, and we have a very exciting, very interesting model, congressional program we have been doing since 2009. i want to get right onto the panel of discussion. let me introduce our moderator, who is a senior fellow for the center for american progress. first, we are also welcoming c-span 3, who is going to be telecasting this program today. those of you who are interested and want to twitter, we are at #afghan elections panel.

karen is a senior fellow at the center for progress. she has written and spoken extensively on issues of south asia and terrorism. she spent some time here in congress on the senate side, as i have and one of my previous incarnations. she has also worked as an elections observer in afghan parliamentary elections in september, 2010, and in pakistan's parliamentary election in february, 2008, so i will pass it on to caroline, who will give introductions, and then we will get started. >> thanks, sandy. hi, everyone. thanks for coming today. we have a great panel, and i am going to quickly add a little more about the alliance in support of the afghan people, of which i am a member. this alliance is a completely bipartisan coalition of afghan and american individuals, and as andy said, it's organized around

this idea that there has been progress made in afghanistan. maybe it's not to the extent we hope given the investment, but there is progress, and it deserves to be sustained. while the members of this coalition don't agree on every detail of policies moving forward, we do have a general sense there is a shared belief that we should remain engaged in afghanistan that we should continue supporting the afghanistan people. we have a panel to discuss saturday's events in the implications of the elections. even though we don't know the results yet, i think it was an exciting day and exceeded many of our expectations.

i think a lot of us were especially concerned about some kind of spectacular attack, and we saw, while there were incidents overall, it seemed to go off well, and the turnout was great, especially in the cities. i know many of us have received e-mails from afghans who were so excited. it was really inspiring to see that unfold. i am going to quickly introduce the panelists here today. i'm not going to get to all the details about their bios, but let me tell you a little bit about them. to my right is the ambassador who is the founder and president of the consulting company based in virginia. he was previously with the u.s.i.p. and before that was the afghan ambassador to canada and france. he is a prolific writer and is often commenting on politics in afghanistan and regional implications, so thank you for being here.

then we have jed, the director of programs. he is responsible for overseeing the implementation of di's programs. he was the chief of staff for the election observation mission, on which i served, so i worked closely with jed. he knows how these technical processes work for elections in afghanistan and also around the world, and we are delighted to have him here to explain where we are and where the process could go. finally, we have lisa curtis, who is a senior research fellow at the heritage foundation. she has been there since 2006, and prior to that, lisa was a member of the professional staff

on the senate foreign relations committee, working for senator lugar, who was the chairman at the time. she has also worked for south and central asia office at the state department, for the foreign service, for the cia, and had a wealth of experience. thank you, lisa. we are going to start with the ambassador. if you can give your assessment of what happened on saturday and what you think it means moving forward for afghans but also for the united states. >> thank you so much. i am happy to be here, and thank you to the partnership for secure america and asap as well for putting this together. glad to be on this panel. saturday turned out to be a historic and groundbreaking day for afghanistan. i think not many people expected this type of turnout on election

day in afghanistan, and didn't expect afghan forces, security forces, to be able to control the situation as best as they did. didn't expect the men and women of the country to line up in a regimented manner and an organized manner, which is usually not the case in afghanistan, and be very patient, patiently await their turn to cast a vote, and they didn't expect to run out of ballot forms and some of the polling stations. as an afghan, i am very proud of what happened. it was a watershed moment that sent several messages. the first was from the afghan

citizen to the nation as a whole saying, we all won. our destiny has won. we have turmoil and conflict, and now the last 13 years have laid the foundation for something better for the country. there was a lot of doubt as to whether a foundation has been laid in afghanistan. from a political perspective and from a nationbuilding and state building perspective, we see the constitutional order it in place in 2004 -- put in place in 2004 and resulted in a lot of work on different fronts trying to develop democracy in afghanistan is paying off.

i do not want to sound overly optimistic, because i think that we have crossed one hurdle or maybe several, but one major hurdle on saturday, and we have several more ahead of us. this electoral process itself is still unfolding. just half an hour ago or so, i saw on twitter that there is breaking news saying one of the leading candidates, one of the top three, is thinking of dropping, because his team does not seem to be picking up some traction, and he may be dropping and is in discussion with at

least one or two of the other main candidates, the front runners. you can see afghanistan on an hour by hour, day by day basis is -- in my opinion, trying to find its way and doing so in a peaceful manner, as we are going to be experiencing the first peaceful, democratic transfer of power in the history of the country. the other message was for those who want to disrupt this process. we all saw what the taliban did or was capable of doing by sending suicide bombers and planting ied's and targeting candidates and ordinary people, mostly soft targets, and that did not happen. that was not realized. on the one hand because afghan security forces did an amazing job. i think the intelligence

services did an amazing job. the head of intelligence today said they had 3400 incidents that were going to occur across the country and almost all of them were neutralized. as a result, more than 50 or so militants would be sent as suicide bombers and so on were killed, and more than 90 were arrested, all parts of different operations. i think that speaks loudly and clearly to the fact that afghan security forces have reached a certain level of capacity that was not observed in the 2009 elections.

i think the message sent to the taliban is that the afghan people have chosen to support a democratic future, that this strategy of trying to intimidate and so forth is not going to dissuade afghans from a better future. it also sent a message that the policy needs to be reviewed, the now they are facing the afghan people and afghan forces. there are other ways of trying to come to terms, and i hope that is heard loud and clear. then there was a message to the international community. a message to especially those who have been on the side of the

afghan people, and that includes the united states at the top of the list. we are not as backwards as some people pretended. we are not as primitive in that this democracy is not bad or wrong. we are going to embrace it. all your efforts, all the blood and treasure that has been spent in afghanistan, has not been in vain, so we look forward to continuing to work with the international community.

i think the message is clear the afghans are not yet ready to take care of everything themselves. they don't have the resources to do so, but they are appreciative of the united states and what others have done. they recognize it is the international community who has paid. we can look forward to a reset in relationships with washington and with others. i think we can look forward to the signing of the bsa with new government in place soon. there are implications the new governor decided to have them

sign it before transfer of power, but regardless, the dsa is seen by most afghans if not all, as the cornerstone of future relations with the united states. nato is another partner in the future. then there is the donor community. all of this is good, but let me end. let me end by saying that there are some major hurdles ahead. there are some challenges ahead with the process, but the expectation is everyone's vote should count. everyone's vote should be respected, and in order to do so, the process has to deal with elections, and the next step with elections, which is counting the votes and handling the votes and transferring them

from one place to another and eventually tallying the votes and doing the part that has to do with complaints, the process of education and so forth, has to be handled in the same manner as elections were handled so forth. it has to be according to the rules. it has to be transparent. it has to be as fair and just as possible. if we can overcome these challenges, then i think we all may be in a position to celebrate, because i think that would be very good news, knowing that the electoral process has functioned as it should and the results would have to be accepted by whoever is a winner, and the results have to be accepted by whoever is a loser.

>> thank you so much. jed, i want to turn it over to you. you know democracy international has a team of people who are there and have been following this, and i know you just returned from afghanistan. could you talk a little bit about the initial assessment of what is happening and where things are going with the process? thank you. >> thank you, caroline. i want to thank the partners for having us here today on this is truly well-timed discussion. we had a modest election observation mission on the ground in kabul. we have been observing the political process in afghanistan since we observed the provincial

council. our initial assessments are very much consistent with the open source reporting you have seen. despite significant threats, personal threats, amidst great personal risk, the fact so many afghans came out and voted in those elections on saturday is really inspiring, and we certainly observed that enthusiasm in the places that our observers were able to get out and observe on election day. the turnout being reported at this point is somewhere around 7 million votes cast. i think we will see that number refined a little bit as the results sheets come in from the polling stations.

a few weeks ago, we were sitting around talking about perhaps we distributed too many ballots around the country, and the fact that one of the issues we are talking about is their were shortages of ballots and because voters are coming out is exactly the opposite of discussion. it is a very positive sign. as you mentioned, the incident of violence in the past and leading to the 2010 parliamentary elections were much higher. on election day specifically the incidents of violence were much more widespread. that was not the case on saturday. the afghan national security

forces performed their jobs admirably on election day, and going forward, i think there are two tracks now, two things i want to talk about. election day is just one part of the process. there was a lead up to election day where we saw a robust campaign. there was great enthusiasm. election day, we saw that. public opinion polls leading up, they said they were going to participate in the election.

we expected there would be a higher turnout. i don't think we expected it would be around 7 million. if that turns out to be the case as to how many people went out to vote, that's a real statement and a statement to others who try to disrupt the process, that democracy is the path to power in afghanistan. what happens over the next couple weeks is critically important to the process. the hard task of determining who won the elections. the process has been depleted throughout the country. the result form should be coming to a council there were they will oversee the tallying of the votes cast on saturday through a double-blind entry process. at some point, we will start to see preliminary results released from the commission.

the results process in the past has been one of the most contentious parts of the process. while we can all agree that on election day what we see is very positive, there is a lot more work to do. it's very important that the commission conduct its work diligently, transparently, not just with the international community and local media, but with the candidate's campaigns, and it's going to be critical that the campaigns exercise some patience and respect the commissions process that they have in place to determine who

won the election and to make sure the votes that were cast on saturday reflect exactly the votes cast on saturday. in addition to the results tabulation process, is a quarantine process. they will do fine some number of triggers by which a polling station is suspicious and whether or not the polling station should be further investigated, so there will be some number of polling stations that will meet the criteria, and the commission will be responsible for going back to determine what will happen there or not. that will be a critical process. it will be important for the commission to be transparent, to

share information, to tell the local and international community exactly what they are doing and what the implications would be. in addition to the results tabulation process, the independent election complaints commission will manage the complaints process, which will happen concurrently with the results tabulation process. the complaints are still coming in, and i believe that process will continue until april 27. the number of complaints is still unknown, although i think the estimate so far has been around 2000. the commission will be responsible for categorizing that into three categories. category a being the ones that could affect the race. those will be the priority complaints the commission will look into.

those will be the most important complaints lodged. it will be most important for the commission to communicate exactly what is the complaint, what's being done, and what the decisions are when they do come to decisions. those processes are extremely critical to the election outcome, and as has been the case in the past, they take some time. it will require patience, particularly among the candidates, to respect the process, to respect the independence of the election commission, the independence of the commission. there are two scenarios were the processes could be even more

important. one is that one candidate could potentially be close to 50%. if that were the case and the actions throughout the process and the decisions through the adjudication process could affect whether or not one candidate gets over the threshold to avoid a second round runoff, which is 50%. the other scenario is the second and third candidates could be very close. under that scenario, the results of the polling stations or a specific complaint that has been lodged could affect whether or not one candidate or the other is participating in a runoff election should know candidate reach 50% plus one, so in those scenarios, the results tabulation process is critically important and complaints process is important, but in those scenarios, they will be

absolutely critical to determine who will be hurt is abating in a runoff election and who will eventually be the next resident of afghanistan. >> can we pull the lens back a little bit and talk about implications for the u.s. and also the region? if you could get a little bit into pakistan. i know you don't have much time, but i would love to hear your thoughts. thank you. then we will open it to questions. >> thanks, caroline. thanks to the department and asap for hosting this event. i am happy this event is taking place today. originally we were thinking of holding it last week. today we have good news to report. the taliban did try its best to disrupt the process.

you had the major attacks at the hotel in kabul, which looked like they were directly targeted. the attack on the independent election commission. but clearly they tried to disrupt the electoral process, and they failed. we saw this in the high voter turnout. most reports are seeing around 60%, which is almost twice as much as turnout in 2009, so what does this say? this says afghans want democracy. they don't want what the taliban has to offer. in a way it is a blow for the taliban. it puts a dent in their narrative. i am not saying the taliban is going to disappear and peace will break out tomorrow, but this will put pressure on the taliban.