The Afghan Presidential elections are over. The first round was characterized by massive fraud which made the incumbent President Hamid Karzai’s victory appear completely implausible and unacceptable to both the Afghan people and the Western coalition. After much armtwisting, Karzai agreed to a runoff, employing all the same mechanisms of fraud and corruption as he did in the first round. The Afghan "Independent" Electoral Commission, which handed the first election to Karzai by stuffing ballots and inventing polling places, remained in place to rig the second round of voting. The challenger, Dr. Abdullah withdrew in disgust, leaving the field to Karzai.
Having a legitimate and credible local partner is essential to the hopes of Western victory over militant forces in Afghanistan, and this election was seen as crucial to the West's chances of success. Tens of thousands of additional American soldiers are set to deploy to the region to continue the grim struggle. To evaluate the prospect of any credible local partner emerging under the occupation, we have to delve into Afghan politics and history. You want?
As I sat there, drinking in Karzai’s latest electoral triumph, I could not help but remember the past, something which the Western media consumer is trained very hard not to be able to do. Karzai reminds me of an Afghan Nabokov who steals instead of writing, but wit the same level of genius. His family are high born Pashtuns, both his father and grandfather held high positions under the Afghan King, the last of a line installed by British and Russian imperialists as a way to redeem the Afghan savages through the most civilized of all possible forms of government, the constitutional monarchy. Perhaps their acquired skills of stealing, honed during the waning days of Afghanistan’s answer to the Hashemite Kings and the Persian Shahs, was passed on to their offspring through some sort of as yet undiscovered Lamarckian political evolution.
Following the overthrow of the king and then the ugly periods of socialist rule followed by the even uglier period of warlord anarchy followed by the truly heinous period of Taliban rule, the Karzai clan remained active in Afghan émigré circles in Pakistan. Karzai’s father was assassinated in Qaetta by unknown assailants. That's what reminded me of Nabokov, rather than Karzai's private penchants. During the long years of exile, Hamid tried to associate himself with the mujaheddin movement, but never got closer to the frontlines than fund raisers at rich Pashtun homes in Peshawar. The Taliban offered him the position of their ambassador to the U.N., for much the same reasons as the US later offered him the presidency - he's a Pashtun who speaks English and had connections to the old elite. Karzai refused and continued living abroad, keeping in touch with Massoud and the other mujaheddin fighting against the Taliban in Afghanistan, while also cultivating Western contacts, biding his time to enter his native land in triumph.
In October of 2001, as American bombers and Special Forces hunter/killer teams descended on Afghanistan, gunning for the al Qaeda high rollers, Karzai crossed the border looking to be at the right place at the right time. According to him, he indeed played a most heroic role, finally receiving the leadership baton as he was in the process of accepting the Taliban's surrender. According to other sources which appear more reliable, he performed much as you would expect a career fundraiser and deal maker to do: he and his small band were inserted by the CIA as a destabilizing element, were accidentally bombed by supporting American air power, with Karzai receiving minor injuries, and finally had to be evacuated by the Americans to save him from falling prisoner to the retreating Taliban forces.
However, this inauspicious start did not hold Karzai back long. The Western powers decided to resolve the fate of newly occupied Afghanistan the old fashioned way - by settling all the thorny points at a European conference to which only the right natives would be invited. Karzai was among the aristocrats, sheikhs and notables of the old monarchic regime who did get the call, as did the aging King, who, after being deposed in 1973, had spent the succeeding decades gardening at a charming central Italian villa and trying not to get assassinated, like his father and Hamid Karzai’s father had been. At a conference in Bonn, Germany, Karzai was appointed interim chairman of the transitional authority which had been set up according to basic UN nation building templates, Balkans/East Timor edition. The innocuous and unassuming sounding Agreement on Provisional Arrangements in Afghanistan Pending the Re-Establishment of Permanent Government Institutions adopted at Bonn and quickly endorsed by the U.N. Security Council also set up the open ended mandate for the existence of the International Security Assistance Force, giving an open ended carte blanche to indefinite operations of an unlimited number of foreign troops pursing a mission outside of the control of the national Afghan government.
The Western powers having learned from the previous errors of colonialism, left the formation of a legitimate national government to a Loya Jerga, a traditional meeting of all the notables of Afghanistan. The dreary task of determining of just who the patricians were in 2001 Afghanistan fell of course on Western handlers, who did their best to exclude the riff raff of the mujaheddin days in favor of less tainted émigrés or tribal sheiks, long a favorite of British kingmakers. The Northern Alliance leaders who had gained for the West a quick and bloodless victory against the Taliban, were politely pushed to the side. The US would not repeat its mistake of 1992, when it let the Tajik and Uzbek warlords try to impose a government on the rest of Afghanistan from Kabul. Leading up to the Loya Jerga, speculation was rife, would the White Men have the tribes take up a King once again, to rule benignly and unobtrusively from his palace gardens in Kabul, or did they have a new best possible political regime that they wished to bestow on Afghanistan? At this point the aging King repaid the Karzai clan's loyal service by throwing his weight behind Karzai. In return, Karzai had him proclaimed a father of the nation in 2002, and the King got his wish – he died of old age. Karzai was a figure acceptable to all sides - he had worked with the mujaheddin, including Massoud, but was not implicated in their crimes. He was fluent in English, and was clearly willing to play ball with whoever in the West was calling the shots.
Very importantly, he was a Pashtun. In theory, and unlike Massoud, who, for all his heroism and sheer machismo, or Rabbani, who had been the President of Afghanistan before the coming of the Taliban, he could win the loyalty of the Pashtun hinterlands away from the Taliban, away from their rigid stance of bellicose tribalism and Islamic fundamentalism, and onto a modernist, democratic nationalism. The West did not want a repeat of the collapse of the government of Rabbani, which lost many of its supporters by restricting power to a Tajik inner cadre of former anti Soviet mujaheddin commanders, leading to a bitter and bloody struggle for power among various commanders who, lacking an external enemy, became merely and nakedly warlords.
The simplistic lesson to draw from that collapse is that a Tajik can never govern Afghanistan, and that lesson is still being applied today, as the US passed on Karzai’s opponent Dr. Abdullah largely because of his Tajik background and connections to Rabbani’s government and the Tajik fighters under Massoud. Unfortunately the hope that a Pashtun would be more capable of uniting Afghanistan has not borne fruit. Since 2001, the Pashtun government of Mr. Karzai did not gain the allegiance of the Pashtun heartland, and has also lost the loyalty of most of the rest of the country, with anti government/anti Western coalition insurgent groups cropping up in every ethnic area of Afghanistan.
Despite his failure to gain support from the Afghan population since his appointment by Western occupying powers 8 years ago, and despite his creation of an entirely ineffectual and viciously corrupt regime, Karzai has managed to stay in power. Assuming that he does not come to a violent end, like his father before him, he will rule Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014, a healthy span indeed. Walking a delicate tight rope between being deposed by his foreign backers for doing too little and being killed by his countrymen for doing too much, Mr. Karzai has tried to stay in Kabul under the protection of the West, and to play each visiting Western dignitary in turn, while forming and breaking alliances with various Afghan power blocs and warlords with lightening speed, using billions in Western aid money to buy and sell support in this desperately poor country.
Alas, no amount of money has succeeded in buying the loyalty of the population, or quieting anger and lust for power among Afghanistan’s many warlike groups. With the exception of his own massively corrupted clan, who smuggle opium and raise off the books war bands for the CIA in the Afghan South, Karzai’s relationship with his fellow Pashtuns has deteriorated, as has his relationship with his Western patrons, who now deal with him with an air of exasperation, as if he was a difficult and unwanted child. But as long as the West continues to funnel billions in reconstruction money through his hands, there is no shortage of warlords and sheiks ready to make deals, and so Karzai has succeeded in repeatedly securing the support of Afghanistan's greatest warlords (excluding those who have already gone over to the Taliban).
This network of alliance allowed Karzai to win an easy, through still fraud marred election in 2005 without facing a serious challenger. While a prominent Northern Alliance commander ran against him, his fellow warlords stayed with Karzai and did not back his bid. During the 2009 election, another prominent Northern Alliance figure, Dr. Abdullah mounted a much more serious challenge to Karzai’s rule, with backing from the foundational thinker and statesmen of the Islamist mujahed movement in Afghanistan, former President Rabbani, but Karzai still managed to get the support of most of Dr. Abdullah's fellows from their days fighting with Massoud (including his opponent from the 2005 election), by giving them prominent posts in his administration. And to really polish off the win, General Dostum, the disgraced Tank Crusher and notorious war criminal, was brought out of exile and flown back to shore up Uzbek support at the last minute. With their support as well as through the use of a thoroughly corrupt network of government officials, Karzai was able to make a complete sham out of the voting process, and to retain his position as President with the reluctant blessing of the UN, the US and NATO as the "legitimate president" of Afghanistan.
If I may be permitted an aside, it is remarkable to consider that most of the historic players of Afghanistan's 30 year civil war are still alive and active in shaping the county’s future. All of the crimes and injuries of a very violent and treachery filled past still permeate the political environment today. The only one not present is the leader of the Tajik forces, Massoud, Afghanistan’s most widely admired figure, who was assassinated by al Qaeda agents, acting in anticipation of the American response for the impending September 11th attacks, on September 9, 2001, a date which is today a national day of mourning and bank holiday in Afghanistan. Since then he has become a beloved martyr and a Che Guevara figure. Though Massoud is dead, he casts a wide shadow on the political landscape. Massoud’s political guide, Burhanuddin Rabbani,, whom Massoud made President of Afghanistan's Tajik led government until it lost Kabul to the Taliban in the 1996, is still alive and angling for power. He was one of the few establishment figures who threw their support wholeheartedly behind Abdullah’s challenge, and the party he has headed for three decades brought Abdullah the bulk of his votes.
General Dostum, who once led a division of fierce Uzbek horsemen under the Communist government in the 1980s, only to switch sides once its money ran out, just threw his weight behind Karzai in return for restoration to power in the Uzbek areas. Hekmatyar, the commander of the Hizb a Islam, an Islamist mujahed grouping which fought side by side with Massoud against the Soviets, but subsequently broke with Massoud and mercilessly shelled Kabul for years, only to unite with him yet again to fight the Taliban onslaught, is now in Pakistan, fighting the United States and Karzai's government in uneasy alliance with the Taliban. Osama Bin Laden is at least technically alive, and thought to be residing in Qaetta, the city where Hamid Karzai spent so many years of his exile.
So the bastard children of Afghanistan’s civil wars met as always in the shadow of their foreign patrons and arms suppliers, and tried to carve up what remains of Afghanistan among themselves yet again. Rabbani and the Tajik idealists, as well as those in the population tired of Karzai and still hoping to get rid of him through the political process, backed Abdullah, while the warlords backed Karzai and the Islamic hardliners fought a guerilla war against everybody. The foreign backed modernists, this time NATO backed democrats instead of Soviet backed socialists, such as Ashraf Ghani, who is so Westernized that he brought James Carville (seriously) to run his campaign in Afghanistan, continue to make little headway against the traditional social forces, leaving only the struggle of ideas between the moderate Islamic politics of Rabbani and the brutal fundamentalism of Hekmatyar and the Taliban, with the argument often coming down to the length of the burka. Unwilling to back Rabbani and the Tajiks a second time after their failure in the 1990s to form a government beyond a small Tajik powerbase, the US reluctantly backed Karzai, a man with no loyalties or philosophy, who professes support for democratic institutions even as he steals one election after another and his brothers sell off Southern Afghanistan heroin brick by heroin brick.
Following the collapse of the second round of elections as a result of the same fraud that invalidated the first round, Karzai declared himself the winner. The Western patrons unenthusiastically fell into line behind him. Obama called to congratulate, not just Karzai, but the entire Afghan people for resolving their election "in accordance with the rule of law" and of course to offer words of wisdom and guidance from the Great Father in Washington. The congratulatory banter was a little subdued, in view of the "messy" (in Obama’s estimation) elections and the need felt by the West for major changes in the governance of Afghanistan. How such changes will occur now that Karzai has another five years in power, after which he is termed out, is unclear. To hold out any hope for such change, it would be necessary to believe that Karzai will spend his final term heroically fighting the corruption that is the main characteristic and underpinning of his government.
Undaunted, Obama is trying to frame the failed election as a moment of renewal, and has prepared a "Compact" of reforms which he wants to see implemented in Afghanistan. Since the government's legitimacy clearly will not be based on democratic support, and will not have sovereignty or strength any time soon, a good governance platform must suffice. To be fair, the "Compact" was probably prepared beforehand to be unveiled after the triumph of budding democracy the Afghan elections were originally supposed to be, but had to be hurriedly repackaged after they became a debacle.
Unfortunately, good governance and Karzai go together just as democracy and Karzai do, and hoping for good governance in arguably the world's most corrupt country regardless of whether Karzai's fraud during the last election had been uncovered or not, is patently absurd. Then again, hope is Obama's slogan (well, Bill Clinton had it first, but he was the Man from Hope, which is completely different than Obama's trademark). Since reforms "must happen," the hope goes, in a moral universe bending toward justice, they will happen, somehow, yes Karzai can. And Karzai is always ready to make compliant statements to placate his Western backers just enough, though what motivation Karzai would have to cooperate with Western powers who clearly hold him in low regard and put up with him only for lack of a better alternative, is, again, unclear. But there's always a chance Obama's enthusiasm and ability to bring change, as proved so many times by his numerous domestic reforms, will somehow possess Karzai, cause him to unite with the other Afghan power players and bring Afghanistan into a golden age.
Hope of this magnitude, possessing this level of invulnerability to reality, is very inspiring. One can see how attractive escaping into a world of hope in the face of a grim reality can be. Unfortunately, as the level of disconnect between hope and reality increases, and as actions are taken based on the hopeful expectations instead of reality, great tragedy may result. In this case, the tragedy will be the fate of tens of thousands of American and other coalition troops who will be heading to Afghanistan in the coming years in the hope that a credible local partner will suddenly sprout from the old dung heap, to give them at least a slim chance of victory, as well as the fate of the tens of thousands of people those troops will kill and maim along the way. But though many may die in an unwinnable struggle, which will probably have to be ended by a subsequent American President with a different mantra, hope itself cannot be defeated, unless of course the slogan tests poorly among future pre-election focus groups.