USA Today
August 18, 2009
Pg. 7
Their Ballots, Our Blood
By Ralph Peters
This week, Afghans go to the polls to vote for a president. Some will vote with enthusiasm, others because their tribal chiefs or local warlords ordered them to mark their ballots. An unknown number will shun the polls from fear or apathy. The Taliban will seek to prevent millions from voting, while extremist mullahs discourage participation.
The fundamental question for Washington is whether this election has any value for us. History's most powerful tool for human selfgovernment, democracy works well either in states with homogeneous populations (such as Sweden) where disagreements are strictly about politics, or in richly diverse states (such as the USA) in which no single ethnic or religious group can bully the others.
In the states in between - those with alpha tribes - democracy rarely produces social peace. If citizens don't think of themselves in national terms but in ethnic or religious categories, the most powerful constituency feasts. The rest get the crumbs.
In Afghanistan, Pashtuns (the population group behind the Taliban) make up 42% of the population, followed by Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, Aimaks and dozens of smaller minorities. Only the urban elite has a sense of nationhood. Elections are about power, spoils and revenge - about dominance rather than leadership.
Meanwhile, mission-focused U.S. officers struggle to persuade Afghan village elders to trust the Kabul government - even though those officers don't trust it themselves. We're talking for our own benefit. And the Afghans know it.
Incumbent President Hamid Karzai is heavily favored to win re-election - not least because of reported campaign abuses - but jockeying continues among the three top candidates. The U.S. government would prefer an upset win by either of the two leading challengers (out of 41 presidential aspirants), but the game appears rigged. We're shrugging and playing along.
Beyond the initial mission
All three serious candidates provide discouraging glimpses into the task we've set ourselves by moving beyond the initial mission of punishing those who attacked us into our history-defying effort to tug Afghanistan into the modern world. (Ignoring the catastrophic failure of the Soviet Union's better-resourced effort, we've decided that we can persuade Afghans to want what we want them to want.)
Karzai was "our man in Kabul" from the early days of American boots on the ground, then he became a grim disappointment. His government is stunningly corrupt and inept at helping the people (aid filters up, not down). Without U.S. support, the regime would've collapsed years ago. In his quest for popular support, Karzai even plays the antiAmerican card and seconds Taliban propaganda claims of mass civilian casualties from U.S. airstrikes. Grudgingly, we continue to back him. We don't know what else to do.
Yet, Karzai's half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, is accused of being the opium king of Kandahar in Afghanistan's troubled south, profiting hugely from the drug trade even as U.S. and NATO forces strive to wean Afghans from opium crops. The president won't move to rein in his brother because he knows that heroin exports are going to continue. If a relative doesn't remain in charge, a political enemy could fill the power vacuum and garner the wealth. So our tax dollars support an alleged "mob family" that received Afghanistan as a gift from our hands. Now, faced with the need to run for re-election, Karzai is courting murderous warlords and religious extremists. It isn't quite the democracy we intended.
Karzai is a Pashtun, as is the Taliban's leadership. His closest rival for the presidency, Abdullah Abdullah, a physician, seems at first glance a national unity candidate because his mother was a Tajik and his father a Pashtun. But Abdullah was an intimate of the Tajik warlord Ahmad Shah Massoud, the "Lion of Panjshir," who fought the Soviets then the Taliban, before his assassination Sept. 9, 2001. Abdullah's hope is to force a two-man runoff by denying Karzai an absolute majority in the first round of balloting. A former foreign minister campaigning on an anti-corruption platform, Abdullah appears to be a man of greater probity and leadership ability - but Karzai looked convincing, too, once upon a time.
The third-place candidate, Ashraf Ghani, was a finance minister under Karzai and a World Bank official. Advised by U.S. political operative James Carville, his campaign is struggling. But Ghani is also a Pashtun, and news media reports suggest that Karzai wants to cut a power-sharing deal to shut out Abdullah and his anti-corruption program.
A foreign policy habit
Even should an upset occur (and be honored), the result will be a still-divided Afghanistan, with an ineradicable Taliban, warlords as regional bosses, little respite for the population, and Western aid looted and squandered.
We're succumbing to a tragic reinvention of our Cold War-era practice of supporting dictators and strongmen because they're "ours." We can no more see beyond Karzai or a small group of Kabul insiders than we were able to look beyond the shah of Iran, CongoZaire's Mobutu Sese Seko, or Iraq's Saddam Hussein in his glory days.
We don't have a strategy in Afghanistan, just a set of foreign policy habits. Our troops aren't dying for our national security, but because Washington is out of ideas. The outcome of this week's election probably won't do much for Afghans, but it definitely won't save us from ourselves.
Ralph Peters is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors and author of a new novel, The War After Armageddon, set in the Middle East after the nuclear destruction of Israel.


