Abdullah Abdullah is dropping out of the second run of the Afghan elections, essentially because he has no faith that the count will be accurate. This means that Hamid Karzai will be elected to another five-year term, but it also means that any chance that Karzai’s victory would be seen as legitimate has gone out the window.
I really don’t know what Obama should do about this. But I think it should end any consideration of committing for the long haul to expanding the power of the central government. Karzai’s government is inept, corrupt, illegitimate, and incapable of establishing security throughout the country. The fact that Karzai’s brother is a CIA asset who is part of the opium trade is just a symptom of the larger problem.
Rather than making a commitment to the central government, the Obama administration should look at this problem differently. The rise of the Taliban and Taliban-like groups in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan is a national security and human rights issue for the people of those two countries, and potentially a national security problem for us, as well. A serious strategy would analyze the degree of the threat and the best ways to manage it. We should have learned in the early 1960’s that we couldn’t win the support of the conservative rice farmers of the Mekong Delta from the air. As long as the Viet Cong controlled the ground, those villagers were never going to support some far-off central government that could not protect them. Bombing their villages just made things worse.
So, containing these militants is important. But drying up their support has to be part of a much longer-term effort. In my opinion, we can’t really lead that effort. The Saudis and the Pakistanis could stop supporting and tolerating them, and that would be far more effective than drone attacks. I’d work on that strategy. But we should acknowledge that these remote mountainous regions have never really been effectively governed by anyone. We (along with the Pakistanis and Afghans) can work to prevent them from moving down out of the mountains to launch operations in Kabul and Islamabad, but we can’t do much about their effective control of these remote villages.
I think the real threat to our national security comes from Pakistan and their nuclear weapons. So, rather than get bogged down in who controls what valley, we should think primarily about the stability of Pakistan’s government and the status of their nuclear stockpile. And, we ought to work out a strategy for doing that that uses the least amount of troops and costs the least amount of money.
