Recent events in Afghanistan do not inspire confidence that the Barack Obama administration knows what it is doing. The administration's current review of its Afghan strategy, though coming disturbingly quickly after its first review, is badly needed.
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The clearly fraudulent Aug. 20 election in Afghanistan has been a serious blow to U.S. strategy and has helped generate consideration of a midcourse policy correction. What is perhaps more worrisome than the election fraud, however, is that the U.S. government actually seemed to believe that this election would work out relatively decently. Of course the election had long been scheduled, and it wouldn't have been politically easy to have it postponed. But life had also radically changed in Afghanistan since the election was scheduled, and that's something the United States should not have brushed over.
The election would, the U.S. government apparently thought, mark a decisive turning point in the effort to create a legitimate, reasonably functioning, national Afghan state, and the public would be reassured that the Afghan effort was on the right track. The United States, its allies, and the United Nations went to extraordinary lengths and spent hundreds of millions of dollars to try to ensure that the election would be, if not "free and fair," at least digestible.
Elections in highly unstable, war-torn areas are always an uncertain thing. The results can be a turning point in establishing political legitimacy -- or they can freeze a bad situation or produce bad rulers. Clearly, Afghanistan was not in a position to hold a legitimate nationwide election. The 2004 election was also flawed, but at least then the operating environment was better with the Taliban having been largely thrown out of the country.
Five years later the military situation has deteriorated badly and President Hamid Karzai's government has been in place long enough that the United States should have understood how it would act in such a scenario. Once again, the American penchant for elections and the impetuous need to demonstrate "success" to prove the legitimacy of Afghanistan's government, show a new American dynamism, and fulfill badly outmoded legal deadlines have produced unhappy results. The United States now has to scurry to live with or try to reverse these results, depending on what it thinks is better for Afghanistan at this point. One can uncharitably ask: If the administration's reading of the Afghan scene is so poor in this case, why should we trust its vastly enlarged nation-building efforts to have better results?
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