Afghan elections expose US war doubts
By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON - Washington continues to wait on results from last week's elections
in Afghanistan, but few analysts here expect the outcome to provide much of a
boost to the United States-backed campaign against the Taliban, regardless of
who wins.
This skepticism about the elections is just one symptom of a growing sense of
disillusionment in the US about the course of the war in Afghanistan, both in
the foreign policy establishment and among the general populace.
Recent weeks have seen an unprecedented debate in the US media about whether
the war - at least in its current incarnation as an intensive
counter-insurgency and development effort aimed
at defeating the Taliban and building a strong Afghan central state - is worth
fighting at all.
War supporters argue in response that President Barack Obama and his top
commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, should be given a 12- to
18-month window to turn the war effort around - setting up a potential showdown
around the time of the 2010 US congressional elections.
Early results from the August 20 Afghan elections began to trickle out this
week. On Wednesday, the country's Independent Election Commission said that
incumbent President Hamid Karzai has received 42% of votes counted so far,
compared to 33% for his leading challenger, former foreign minister Abdullah
Abdullah.
The current results would leave Karzai short of the 51% threshold needed to
avoid a runoff, but it is difficult to extrapolate from the ballots counted so
far without a geographical breakdown of where they came from.
Abdullah has already alleged fraud on the part of the Karzai campaign, and
analysts in the US do not discount the possibility. Last week, Inter Press
Service's Gareth Porter reported that Karzai was collaborating with leading
Afghan warlords to pad his vote total and avoid a runoff election. (See
Karzai's fraud scheme could backfire Asia Times Online, August 21,
2009.)
Other analysts note the importance of Karzai's alliances with warlords for his
re-election campaign.
If Karzai wins in the first round, "He almost certainly will owe it to the
endorsements that he got in the days just before the election from several
warlords ... most notably Abdul Rashid Dostum," said Bruce Riedel, a former
Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Council analyst who chaired
the Obama administration's Afghanistan/Pakistan strategic review earlier this
year, at a Brookings Institution panel on Afghanistan on Tuesday.
Dostum, the most powerful leader among Afghanistan's Uzbek minority, is known
for a human-rights record that is widely considered to be atrocious, even
compared to his fellow warlords.
"If Karzai is returned to office now because of Dostum's support, then hopes
for anti-corruption, good governance and the rest are going to be rather weak
in the second round of the Karzai administration," Riedel said.
Karzai has been widely criticized for the perceived corruption of his
government, and appears to have lost much of the confidence of his US backers.
Still, most analysts see Afghanistan's problems as more institutional than
personality driven.
"Regardless of who wins, we will not have people capable of governing," said
Anthony Cordesman, an influential military strategist at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies. "Karzai is corrupt and lacks capacity;
Abdullah has governed precisely nothing in the way of a large-scale structure."
Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last
week that the situation in Afghanistan was "deteriorating".
Cordesman, if anything, was more pessimistic. He claimed that the Karzai
government has either lost control or is at high risk of losing control in 40%
of its territory, and that the latest US government and media estimates of the
growth of the Taliban threat have been "flatly dishonest".
Kimberly Kagan, president of the Institute for the Study of War and a leading
Afghanistan hawk, agreed with Mullen's assessment, but claimed that a
stepped-up counter-insurgency (COIN) campaign could turn the tide.
Kagan argued that a successful COIN campaign would require both a further
increase in the number of US troops in Afghanistan and a re-allocation of
troops within the country.
In the wake of what has frequently been portrayed as the success of the "surge"
strategy in Iraq - of which Kagan's husband, Frederick Kagan, was a chief
proponent - many hawks have argued that the lessons of the surge and of COIN
can be applied to Afghanistan as well.
Mullen and Defense Secretary Robert Gates installed McChrystal and ousted his
predecessor, General David McKiernan, in large part due to the belief that
McChrystal was better suited to run an unconventional COIN-style campaign.
Since his accession, McChrystal has emphasized civilian protection as the
foundation of US strategy in Afghanistan, and Obama has added 17,000 troops to
the US force. Many suggest that further troop increases will soon prove
necessary.
Supporters envision a redoubled civilian development effort to complement the
military effort, in accordance with the COIN mantra "clear, hold, and build".
But critics argue that the decline in violence in Iraq was due to a number of
factors, many of them having little to do with the US "surge", and that hawks
have been too quick to embrace COIN as an all-purpose solution to the current
woes in Afghanistan.
"We need to stop talking about 'smart power' as if we have it," Cordesman said
Tuesday. "As yet, you cannot find anywhere in American military literature a
definition of what 'hold and build' means, or a single statement by any US
official to indicate when the capability ... to provide hold and build will be
deployed."
He described the situation in Afghanistan as "all-too-familiar, not just to
Iraq, but to Vietnam".
Other COIN skeptics also make the Vietnam analogy - a reference to the last
time COIN was ascendent in military circles, and the US entertained hopes of
reshaping hostile societies through force of arms joined to civilian expertise.
As Obama leans toward an escalated COIN campaign in Afghanistan, a growing
number of commentators have begun to ask whether the US is taking a wrong turn.
While support for the war has declined dramatically among the US public - with
51% of US citizens believing the war is not worth fighting, according to a
recent Washington Post-ABC News poll - recent weeks have been notable for the
sudden willingness of voices within the foreign policy establishment to
question the war.
Last week, Council of Foreign Relations president Richard Haass took issue with
Obama's claim that Afghanistan is a "war of necessity", arguing in The New York
Times that Afghanistan is "not just a war of choice but a tough choice".
Haass offered tentative support for Obama's strategy, but urged the
consideration of alternative policies, up to and including the withdrawal of
all US troops from Afghanistan.
A blunter assessment came in July from Rory Stewart, a Harvard professor and
British parliamentary candidate, who wrote in the London Review of Books that
"it is impossible for [the] allies to build an Afghan state", and labeled the
entire allied strategy "the irresistible illusion".
The influential COIN-themed blog Abu Muqawama, which generally focuses on
tactical and operational issues related to COIN rather than broader political
questions, went so far as to host a week-long debate this month on whether the
war is in the interests of the US and its allies.
Mullen told the Washington Post on Wednesday that with the right resources, the
US and its allies could make progress against the insurgency within the next 12
to 18 months.
Many war supporters have echoed this timeline in response to sceptics, with
both Riedel and Kagan saying Tuesday that the allies should be given 12 to 18
months to show progress before any decision on whether to scale back the war
effort is made.
A 12- to 18-month timeline would mean a reassessment of the war in late 2010 or
early 2011 - right around the November 2010 US congressional elections.
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