Before I came to Afghanistan, I thought that a runoff would be a good way to deal with the fallout from the disputed presidential election that took place in August. Now that I’ve been here a week, I’m not so sure. All the problems that plagued the first round of presidential balloting — fraud and insecurity — are likely to be present in the second round. They could even be worse because there will be less time to prepare for the second election. It would have to take place by mid-November at the latest, otherwise the onset of winter will make it impossible to distribute and collect the ballots. With little time to prepare or publicize, the turnout would be low, and fraud would no doubt occur — just as it did last time. The general feeling here is that Karzai would come out on top but that the voting would do little to enhance his legitimacy.

A better solution would be a power-sharing accord that brings his main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister, into the government. It is also important to appoint a chief of staff or some other senior official who would be charged with increasing the efficiency of Karzai’s highly inefficient administration. Ultimately, the people of Afghanistan will judge their government based not on the procedures that put it into office but on what it does in power. If Karzai can govern more competently and defer less to corrupt politicos and warlords, he will win the people’s trust.

The worst thing the Obama administration could do is throw up its hands in despair and claim we can’t win in Afghanistan because of Karzai’s problems. In fact, every counterinsurgency effort in history has faced a problem of governmental legitimacy; if the government were generally accepted as legitimate and efficient, there would be no insurgency to begin with. Enhancing governmental credibility is a tough task but by no means a mission impossible — we’ve helped achieve that outcome in countries as varied as Greece, the Philippines, and El Salvador. We can do it in Afghanistan, too, if we work behind the scenes with Karzai to rectify some of his government’s shortcomings.

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 16th, 2009 at 7:13 AM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.