So it’s looking like Hamid Karzai stole an election. What now? One option, apparently favored by the United States, is to try and persuade robbed rival Abdullah Abdullah to join Karzai’s government. Andrew Exum, an adviser to Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s Afghanistan strategy review, worries that this may prove to be the “moment when historians will judge we should have cut the cord on the Afghan government.” Brookings’ Bruce Reidel, who chaired President Obama’s strategy review, tells The New York Times that the U.S. can’t afford to do that: “We have a fundamental interest in building up the legitimacy of the Karzai government.”

Another option was advanced by Anatol Lieven of King’s College and the New America Foundation a few days ago:

Instead, in my view, the Obama administration should adopt the following strategy: If the legitimacy of Karzai’s victory is seriously challenged by Abdullah to the extent that the June Iranian elections were, then Washington should agree that the results lack credibility and cannot be recognized, and use this as an excuse to move from a presidential to a prime ministerial system. A loyah jirga (grand national assembly) can be called to legalise this constitutional change. A caretaker prime minister can then be appointed who would attempt to bring more conservative Pashtuns into his cabinet. If Washington decides that this is a step too far and Karzai must remain as president, his loss of authority and legitimacy should nonetheless be made the basis for forcing him to appoint a prime minister to assume most responsibility for the actual running of the government.

This should be accompanied by a move to legalise the presence of political parties in the Afghan parliament, prior to the parliamentary elections next year. The Taliban should be actively encouraged to form a political wing and to take part in these elections—along the lines of the bizarre, but in the end very helpful, system in Northern Ireland, where even at the height of the British campaign against the IRA, its political wing, Sinn Fein, remained a legal party and stood for election.

Audacious! But how can the United States tell Afghanistan that the election was so fraudulent that it needs to essentially reshape its government outside its constitution? And what could the U.S. really do, short of threatening to withhold aid, if Karzai refused to acquiesce to the plan?

Update: In Exum’s comments, Shawn Brimley, a top official in the Pentagon’s policy directorate, says (it’s the 1:29 p.m. comment):

I think the best option is to go forward by focusing on local and regional approaches to security capacity and governance. I mean look, this is ultimately what we did in Iraq. Yes the election outcome is a worst case scenario but to me suggests simply shifting our focus toward a bottom-up approach, something that both the history of Afghanistan and our own recent operational experience suggests is the best option in a world of bad ones.