Bluntly put, American and NATO involvement in Afghanistan last year was largely a catastrophic failure. After eight months of bleeding troops throughout the country (especially in Kandahar and Helmand, among other places), the coalition nations received a slap in the face from President Hamid Karzai in the form of a blatantly rigged election, as hundreds of allegations of electoral fraud emerged, though Karzai was still short of the 50% threshold to avoid a runoff.
Though the Obama team hoped the runoff would help restore the aire of democracy to the Karzai regime, but that effort was short-circuited when Abdullah Abdullah, the opposition candidate, dropped out of the race six days before the nation was supposed to go to the polls.
Obama has another chance to push reset though, as Afghans go to the polls on May 22 to elect a new parliament. Many congressmen have already urged the president to delay the vote, arguing that August’s debacle demonstrated that Afghanistan’s electoral commission has little resolve and that greater reforms to the system will be needed to avert catastrophe a second time.
Certainly these issues will be important, and the Obama administration must weed out Karzai cronyism wherever possible. But this only serves to illuminate a greater cancer alive in Afghan society. In any democratic system, the rule of law is the primary systemic instrument to champion liberty. In most of tribal Afghanistan, it is largely non-existent, as a resurgent Taliban and regional warlords impose themselves freely upon the people. The court system is backlogged, under resourced, and plagued by incompetence, constitutional underdevelopment and a lack of popular legitimacy. The ICJ laments its human rights violations with regularity.
Systemically, Afghanistan is extremely flawed. In the 2003 constitution, power is centralized around the President, who initiates the legislative agenda of the bicameral legislature, mostly ignoring Afghanistan’s underlying power framework of tribal rulers on a local level. The cure here is properly resourcing local governments and networking them with the Federal levels. This process will be extremely difficult, but aided by the (relatively) popular Afghan police and army, who reinforce the need for a democratic system.
But whether Afghanistan, in the long run, will be able to walk the democratic tight-rope by maintaining rule of law depends also on the growth of its private sector. Democracy is unlikely to blossom in a place where the opium poppy is a dominant export. As foreign direct investment pours in from China and elsewhere, Afghanistan may begin to see increased security: drastically improving a highly fragmented tax base, legitimizing and reinforcing central power from the local level (the way things ought to be).
May 22nd looms as another test for Karzai’s regime, and consequentially, the future of coalition efforts in the Afghan kush. Don’t hold your breath though.
