President Obama will soon have 100,000 troops fighting a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. Their success depends on having a credible Afghan partner. Unfortunately, Obama's partner is Hamid Karzai.
In the eight years since the Bush administration helped install Karzai as president after the fall of the Taliban, he has run a government so ineffective that Afghans deride him as being no more than the mayor of Kabul and so corrupt that his country ranks 179th on Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index, just ahead of last-place Somalia, which has no government at all.
Afghanistan held a presidential election last August just as Obama was ramping up U.S. support for the war. Although funded by the United States and other Western countries and supported by the United Nations, the elections were massively fraudulent. Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission (IEC) -- which, despite its name, is appointed by and answers to Karzai -- oversaw massive vote-rigging in which at least one-third of Karzai's tally, more than 1 million votes, was fake. A separate, independently appointed Electoral Complaints Commission eventually tossed out enough Karzai votes to force a second round of balloting, but the IEC ensured that the voting procedures were even more prone to fraud than those applied to the first round. Karzai's main opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, rightly chose not to participate in the second round.
Many Afghans understandably do not see Karzai as a democratically elected leader. So America's Afghan partner suffers from a legitimacy deficit in addition to his track record of ineffectiveness and corruption.
Karzai has responded to this legitimacy crisis not by fixing his country's broken electoral processes but by trying to corrupt it further. Ahead of parliamentary elections due this fall, Karzai promulgated a decree giving himself power to appoint all five members of the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) and stripping the commission of most of its powers. Far from rejecting this outrageous power play, the U.N. mission in Kabul tried to broker a compromise under which it would propose two names to Karzai (previously the United Nations had appointed three members) but still leave him with the final authority to appoint all members of the emasculated commission. Fortunately, Afghanistan's parliament recently rejected this shameful compromise.
The parliament's actions seem to have sent Karzai off the deep end, as his recent remarks show. In contrast to previous assertions that last year's elections were not fraudulent, Karzai claimed in a speech last week that I orchestrated the deception while serving in Afghanistan: "Foreigners did the fraud. Galbraith did it," he said. According to Karzai, I stole the election on his behalf so I could embarrass him by leaking word of the fraud to the international media and thus weaken his authority. (The irony, as I wrote in The Post last October, is that I urged my superiors at the United Nations to do something about the fraud, and they not only disagreed but fired me.) Karzai also told Afghan parliamentarians that he might join the Taliban and, this week, claimed that the United States had perpetrated the fraud.
We gotta be able to find something better. Anyone feeling like this is the mid-60s in Vietnam all over again? The guy we don't want would likely win an open election, so we continue to back the guy nobody wants to keep the guy we don't want from winning an election we claim to want. Sigh.
By: Brant
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