If Hamid Karzai wins, it’s the failing status quo, and a powerful narrative that democracy doesn’t work. If Abdullah Abdullah somehow wins, then he’ll have to deal with the powerful entrenched interests in Kabul that even Karzai couldn’t meaningfully change—which would mean a continuation of the status quo and a powerful narrative that democracy doesn’t work. If somehow the planets align and Ashraf Ghani wins, then Kabul will get to experience yet another America-friendly egotistical technocrat—precisely what Karzai was in 2002—and very little would likely change. You know the rest.

Afghan Presisent Hamid Karzai (U.S. Dept. of Defense)

With Thursday’s presidential election in Afghanistan proving difficult to forecast, some analysts in and outside the Obama administration are considering U.S. options if the next government is viewed as illegitimate. If so, the U.S. may push the winner toward forming a “national unity government” to incorporate the losing factions into a governing coalition — a move that incumbent president Hamid Karzai is already indicating he’ll pursue.

At issue is the prospect of either violence, voter apathy or anger at the election returns yielding a government that attempts to rule 34 million million people with an asterisk beside its name. Earlier this year, an independent Afghan election commission decreed that security dangers compelled pushing the vote from April to August, a decision with consequences for the Obama administration, as it sought to work with the lame-duck Karzai government to improve deteriorating security and governance.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Last Wednesday at an event at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington, Amb. Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said that some of the administration’s plans for expanding Afghan governing capacity — viewed as integral to the war’s fortunes — required a delay until a legitimate government resulted from the election. “A government needs legitimacy,” Holbrooke said last week. “The decision to ignore the constitution and delay the election has caused a reorientation of our priorities for the first six and a half months of this administration.”

An election seen as illegitimate by the Afghan people could further jeopardize Obama’s plans to bolster Afghan governance and development, as the victor of the election would have a hard time making the difficult governing decisions Obama sees as necessary to reverse the war’s fortunes. Holbrooke last week suggested that a host of U.S. priorities for Afghanistan — “anti-corruption, a national reintegration amnesty program [for insurgents], improving the governance at the sub-central level,” all of which he called “vitally important in an overall counterinsurgency effort” — might be compromised if the next government cannot command the support of its people. Another problem, said Ronald Neumann, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007, would be the “loss of U.S. domestic and Congressional support for the rough road ahead.”

The prevailing opinion by observers in Afghanistan and outside is uncertainty over the state of the race. Most polls show Karzai with double-digit leads over his 40 challengers, but experts caution that polling in a country beset with such widespread lack of security is problematic. Some of Karzai’s challengers, such as former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah and former finance minister Ashraf Ghani, are showing anecdotal signs of electoral strength, according to news reports. In a phone call from Kabul, Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who is monitoring the elections as part of a delegation from the nongovernmental organization Democracy International, said, “The people that are here, from journalists, aid workers,  people here for years, at the embassy and ISAF [the NATO military command], you ask what’s going to happen and they don’t have a strong theory of the case. There’s a great deal of uncertainty.”

Holbrooke said on Wednesday that the international media would play a large role in setting a narrative of credibility and legitimacy for the election’s results. Similarly, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton released a statement on Monday urging the press to “refrain from speculation until results are announced” and for “candidates and their supporters to behave responsibly before and after the elections.” She promised neutrality by the United States, which has 68,000 troops in Afghanistan.

The Taliban-led insurgency has threatened violent retaliation against any Afghan who votes in the election, and has launched a series of attacks on Kabul, the capital, in advance of the vote. According to Canadian Brig. Gen. Eric Tremblay, an ISAF spokesman, insurgents have averaged 32 attacks daily over the last 10 days, and a spike of 48 attacks during the last three. But Tremblay was confident that even if the insurgents were able to conduct “up to 65 attacks on different locations throughout Afghanistan” on Thursday they would only be able to reach one percent of Afghanistan’s approximately 6,500 polling centers.

The chief of ISAF’s election task force, Australian Brig. Gen. Damien Cantwell, said on a conference call Tuesday that Afghan security forces would take the lead role on securing the polling sites. “We’ll be ready to react” if those forces are overwhelmed by insurgents, Cantwell said.

U.S. officials would not comment on the record about the election for fear of being perceived as interfering, which would compound legitimacy concerns. Nor would officials interviewed for this story offer any predictions for what will happen on Thursday. But one official, who declined to be identified, said that if the election is “not perceived to be broadly legitimate,” it would merit a “whole new series of efforts to get beyond the perceived illegitimacy,” such as “a national unity government or pulling competitors into the government some other way.”

Shuja Nawaz, a South Asia scholar at the Atlantic Council who has advised Gen. David Petraeus about the region, said that “whatever the outcome of the election,” the next government would “seek some kind of ex post facto legitimacy by working out deals” among rival factions. Already Karzai has floated an offer to his rival Ashraf Ghani to join the government in the event Karzai wins reelection. (Ghani, who is being advised by Clinton confidante James Carville, has written a book with development expert Clare Lockhart, who has also advised Petraeus. She did not respond to a voicemail seeking comment for this piece.) “It’s very important for the coalition to have a working government in Kabul,” Nawaz said. “There will be tremendous pressure on the other major candidates to try work something out.”

While the U.S. official cautioned that a legitimacy crisis following the election would “forestall progress on all other areas,” some saw such a crisis as an unlikely scenario. “Karzai would be a fool to do something seen as anti-democratic,” a former intelligence officer with experience in Afghanistan who requested anonymity said. Nawaz pegged the odds for the election resulting in a government seen as illegitimate at 30 percent.

Yet at least one contender’s camp has said it views the reelection of Karzai to indicate fraud in and of itself. “We will not accept it. [Mr Karzai] cannot win unless he resorts to large-scale corruption, so we will not accept that,” Abdullah’s campaign manager, Abdul Sattar Murad, told the United Arab Emirates-based newspaper The National.

Cantwell did not directly address a question about the implications for NATO military actions if the elections were viewed as illegitimate, saying the elections were “an important step, but one of many” for Afghanistan. But he appeared to echo Holbrooke in observing that “all those sorts of reconstruction and stabilization activities that have been brought to bear are also underpinned by governance improvement.”

Additionally, perceived illegitimacy in the election could exacerbate sectarian tensions in Afghanistan. While Karzai is a Pashtun, much of his government is run by members of other ethnic groups, feeding into the Taliban’s message that the government disenfranchises Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group. “If election is considered ‘stolen,’ which will only happen in the case of a Karzai win since it is his backers who have the means (government positions) to steal on a meaningful national level, there will be trouble with other ethnic groups, primarily Tajiks as Hazaras and Uzbeks will split votes,” Neumann said in an email. “If Abdullah wins in way where Pushtuns feel ‘we was cheated’ it will be a help to Taliban recruitment and make locals in the most difficult provinces, especially Helmand, Kandahar etc. harder to bring into support of the government. Probably not a similar problem for Asraf Ghani as he is a Pushtun.”

Still, Katulis said from Kabul, there were indications of optimism among Afghans. “In the face of violence and threats of intimidation people seem interested in this… there’s a parallel tension about security and uncertainty about the post-election period, but at the same time [there's] a hopeful political debate that’s happening in certain parts of the country and people seem pretty interested in the election.” Nawaz added that despite a recent history of war and authoritarianism, the number of competitive candidates in this year’s election represented “a great leap forward. It’s a huge victory for Afghans.”

At a small gathering in a private home last night, I met journalists and aid workers who have years of experience in the country and no one could predict what’s going to happen in the next few days.

Meanwhile, Alex Strick van Linschoten reports from three Kandahar candidate rallies. Click through for the full flavor, but Abdullah Abdullah’s audience was distracted and bored; Ashraf Ghani was passionate and technocratic; most people showed up for incumbent president Hamid Karzai.

Which makes it really hard to understand how James Carville has signed on to work for probably-hopeless candidate Ashraf Ghani, a former finance minister with more of a following in Washington than in Afghanistan, given that Carville is a close confidante of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Bloomberg reports that Carville doesn’t think there’s a problem:

“I don’t think anybody would veto me doing this,” said Carville, 64, who said he has worked on campaigns in 18 countries. “I’ve worked in Israel when Bill Clinton was president. It’s what I do.”

Bloomberg’s Indira A.R. Lakshmanan gets a quote from State Department spokesman Ian Kelly saying Clinton and the department aren’t concerned about Carville working for Ghani. But the perception that Carville represents a Clintonite thumb on Ghani’s side of the Afghan electoral scale is kind of unavoidable. Why Ghani thinks that might help him — as elections approach in Afghanistan, Karzai has grown more critical of the U.S., not less — is bewildering, but that might be an indicator of Ghani’s flaws as a candidate. Carville is clearly free to advise whomever he wants, and it’s neither his fault nor his responsibility that Clinton is the U.S.’s top diplomat. But this may be another bit of turbulence that the U.S. and Karzai will have to overcome after the August election.

Here’s a rigorously reported piece on the history of the relationship between the United States and Afghan President Hamid Karzai — as you’ll see from the piece, we only have a U.S.-Afghan relationship as a derivative effect — from Rajiv Chandrasekaran. It suggests this must be a perplexing time for Karzai: he spent the last seven years being alternatively cultivated by the Bush administration and providing it with a fig leaf, so to see the Obama administration being unimpressed with him and seemingly unwilling to change its perspective on him has to be difficult to understand. According to Chandrasekaran, now that it appears unlikely that anyone will successfully dislodge Karzai from office in the summer’s elections, the Obama administration’s approach will be to treat him as irrelevant:

Obama intends to maintain an arm’s-length relationship with Karzai in the hope that it will lead him to address issues of concern to the United States, according to senior U.S. government officials. The administration will also seek to bypass Karzai by working more closely with other members of his cabinet and by funneling more money to local governors.

Time will tell whether this amounts to irresponsibility. But it seems egregious to write off the probably reelected president of a major ally while fighting a war in his country, even if he’s failed to demonstrate his capability to govern responsibly. It would be nice to think that the administration’s approach is to broaden the U.S.-Karzai relationship into a U.S.-Afghan relationship. But it’s not like the governors of Afghanistan are a bunch of enlightened technocrats and statesmen. They’re people like Gul Agha Shirzai — warlords-turned-governors. In a country with a weak central government and limited history of competent central governance, efforts to rebalance the relationship between the capitol and the provinces by well-intentioned foreign actors can easily end up as destabilizing vectors.

I defer to Joshua Foust, but it doesn’t take a Karzai apologist (or Bush apologist) to start wondering if the administration’s approach to Karzai isn’t beginning to seem like anything-but-Bush-ism. ]]> http://washingtonindependent.com/41970/treating-karzai-like-a-bad-smell/feed 2 http://washingtonindependent.com/32235/what-if-karzai-wins-the-election http://washingtonindependent.com/32235/what-if-karzai-wins-the-election#comments Tue, 03 Mar 2009 21:12:14 +0000 Spencer Ackerman http://washingtonindependent.com/?p=32235 Erin Simpson makes the good point that Hamid Karzai is being underestimated. This seems difficult to argue with. If the Bush administration had an Afghanistan policy that was reduced to supporting Karzai, the Obama administration is treating him like the guest at 3 a.m. who wants one more round More...