Kabul, Afghanistan—To begin with, only three of the 18 candidates showed up. It was the first presidential debate in the history of Afghanistan, but it sure didn't feel historic.

A couple dozen representatives from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), observers, and journalists sit waiting in a conference room at the Intercontinental Hotel. "It must be the traffic," says the moderator, Mir Ahmad Joyenda of the Foundation for Culture and Civil Society (FCCS), an Afghan NGO sponsoring the debate. Wakil Mangal, one of the three candidates present, talks on his cellphone at one of the two banquet tables set up at the front of the room. It has already been an hour that the audience has been waiting, but Joyenda asks for another half an hour to allow Afghan TV, stuck in traffic, to arrive (since a selling point of this debate is that it was to be broadcast live around the country).

When it actually begins, the debate is more like a panel, with each of the representatives (six vice presidential candidates are present, along with the three presidential candidates) given two to three minutes to answer each question. The structure quickly breaks down, as the speakers use their time to protest the format, give long-winded seven-point answers, and keep speaking even after the moderator says politely, "Tashakur, tashakur." ("thank you, thank you").

The first question is what should be done to eradicate corruption in the government, which elicits almost identical responses along the lines of, "Transparency is very important in the government, and a new system must be created." The second is whether war criminals in Afghanistan should be put on trial or pardoned. To this, the answers break down along warlord-vs.-non-warlord candidate lines. Satar Sirat, an independent candidate who was justice minister under the former king, says, "We can't prosecute war criminals until we clean up the judicial system. You can't have one war criminal prosecuting another." The vice president for Mohammad Mohaqqeq, a Hazara warlord who may very well have committed war crimes, quotes a verse from the Koran: "It is better to pardon than to revenge."

On the edge of the debate, as the audience slowly trickles off, Robert Kluyver, a Dutch consultant to the FCCS, stands around wringing his hands. "All the presidential candidates here have no political experience. They don't understand that a debate on TV is more important than meeting a couple of tribal elders from a faraway place," he says. The foundation contacted the candidates every day, and had 12 confirmed as of the day before the debate. "I think we would have done better in any high school."