Some will no doubt take that headline as a rhetorical question, but John Hudson at Atlantic Wire has compiled views from people who were willing to answer it anyway. Some excerpts:
A Corrupt Election Commission, warns The Economist: "Perhaps the biggest problem is the IEC [Independent Election Commission] itself, a body regarded as so biased towards Mr Karzai and complicit in fraud that some analysts say there is no point in running another vote under its auspices. Martine van Bijlert, of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, a think-tank, says that without big changes, voters will feel that the outcome will be determined not by their votes but by the IEC. UN staff have called for hundreds of IEC officials, particularly those who turned a blind eye to fraud, to be sacked. But only the IEC can make such a decision. With just a fortnight before the election, it is impossible for proper reform to take place, particularly as the only man with the power to hire and fire its commissioners is Mr Karzai himself."
A Security Nightmare, writes Rajan Menon, an Afghan scholar writing in the Los Angeles Times: "It's a sure bet that the Taliban, true to form, will warn voters to stay at home during the vote on pain of death, and try to kill those who are not intimidated. It has become a formidable force and is no longer confined to its Pashtun strongholds in the south and east. This raises the question of how the country can be made safe enough to ensure a reasonable turnout."
[...]
A Genuine Farce, writes Steve Hynd at Newshoggers: "Despite every member of both the Obama administration and Gordon Brown's government who has an opportunity to voice an opinion getting ready to follow Richard Holbrooke's spin that there will be less 'irregularities' in the Afghan run-off election, none really believe it. It's all about creating an illusion of legitimacy around Karzai's inevitable win so that the troop escalation and continued occupation can proceed. Not even the heads of the two electoral bodies concerned with the election believe the spin... Karzai had to be all-but dragged onto the podium to accept the run-off decision."
Meanwhile, the Washington Post is reporting that a Foreign Service officer has quit because of the Afghan War. Matthew Hoh had been a Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq, and also served at the Pentagon and State Department. He was widely seen as exactly the kind of smart, civil-military hybrid the administration says it wants in the occupation.
But last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, Hoh, 36, became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency.
"I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan," he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department's head of personnel. "I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end." ...
There are plenty of dudes who need to be killed," he said of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. "I was never more happy than when our Iraq team whacked a bunch of guys."
But many Afghans, he wrote in his resignation letter, are fighting the United States largely because its troops are there -- a growing military presence in villages and valleys where outsiders, including other Afghans, are not welcome and where the corrupt, U.S.-backed national government is rejected. While the Taliban is a malign presence, and Pakistan-based al-Qaeda needs to be confronted, he said, the United States is asking its troops to die in Afghanistan for what is essentially a far-off civil war.
Why and to what end? A lot of Americans are asking that same question.
