Costs of War: Elusive Afghan Goals

The reports of widespread fraud in the Afghan elections have severely damaged the legitimacy of both the government of President Hamid Karzai and its international allies, which counterinsurgency experts see as essential to the mission to defeat or even contain the Taliban.

With hundreds of complaints registered with the Electoral Complaints Commission in Kabul, and the growing conviction that Karzai's supporters attempted to fix the poll, international observers are now pinning their hopes on a run-off vote between Karzai and the front-running challenger Abdullah Abdullah - which the Afghan Constitution calls for if one of the candidates does not get a simple majority of the vote.

A run-off would be the best way of restoring the legitimacy of both the electoral process and the outcome, several observers from the National Democratic Institute who monitored the election told a recent briefing in Washington.

"The long-term consequences of not having a run-off and not having a president seen as credible [...] will be very serious," Christine Fair, one of the observers, said. "If these problems aren't dealt with now it will threaten the legitimacy of the whole process," added her colleague Peter Manikas.

In an interview with ISN Security Watch, another election monitor, Evelyn Farkas, agreed that the flawed poll had ended up undermining the credibility of the Karzai government and "so far looks like a setback" - a circumstance she blamed in part on the international community being "so hands off.

"We should have helped them with a voter registration list and vetting election officials," at a minimum, she added.

"I think the [Karzai] government lost legitimacy, but it didn't have much before the elections," she continued. The poll had already been postponed once, and it had to happen, she said.

"The good news," for Farkas is that an orderly election was held - "the election officials and poll workers were very well-trained and handled the elections competently on election day. Even if some of them were guilty of electoral fraud, not all of them were."

She also drew encouragement - in common with many other international observers - from the growing involvement of civil society groups. Farkas said that poll data showed "The mood of Afghan voters became significantly more positive" in the run-up to the elections, and even if that bump had now dissipated, "Afghans still believe they are vastly better off than they were in 2001 before we booted the Taliban out."

At the same time, the growing tensions within the international alliance - exemplified by the blame game over the German-ordered airstrike by US planes on a fuel in tanker in Kunduz, which killed at least 70 civilians, according to Afghan human rights groups - are threatening its integrity. It is no small matter that European leaders during the weekend called for an international conference on the future of Afghanistan to see how that country's government and security forces should take greater responsibility for the war.

According to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the aim of such a gathering would be to “see how the Afghan population itself, its army, its police force and civic institutions can play a bigger role in the future."

But neither he nor German Chancellor Angela Merkel apparently thought it necessary to consult the US before announcing plans for the conference.

The US military commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, said last week that the Afghan army could be ready to assume primary responsibility for securing the country within three years, but that police would need much more time, according to ABC News.

One problem, according to some critics, is that the minimization of US goals undertaken by President Barack Obama is something of a sleight of hand, if not an actual fraud. Obama has said that the only strategic US goal in Afghanistan is to destroy al-Qaida and its safe haven on the Afghan-Pakistan border - eschewing any broader nation-building agenda.

"We minimized [US goals in Afghanistan] because the feeling was it was all we could get support for," former state department official and scholar Marvin Weibaum told ISN Security Watch, adding that the "window of political opportunity" for even those limited goals might be closing.

But in reality, especially given the enthusiasm with which his military has embraced counterinsurgency theory, it is hard to see how even the limited goal of extirpating al-Qaida can work without re-building Afghan government and society - a generational task if ever there was one.

Bernard Finel, a senior fellow at the American Security Project and formerly professor of military strategy and operations at the US National War College told ISN Security Watch, “There is not enough granularity in the articulation of [the administration's] goals.

“We have metrics because we don’t have a clear objective. If you don’t know your desired end-state, you end up measuring the things you can measure - how many troops you’ve trained, how many schools you’ve built […] - but your ultimate goal is not to train troops or build schools.”

Finel says this lack of clarity is the product of a lack of intellectual rigor on the administration's part.

“For all the talk about strategic reviews and new objectives, the architects of this [new administration] strategy are all drawn from a relatively small group of people […] all on-board with this strategy of improving Afghan governance and executing a population-centric counterinsurgency strategy […]. Not very many critics or skeptics have been invited to the table.”

Finel says he was horrified to hear Obama's special envoy Richard Holbrooke say of the desired outcome in Afghanistan, "I'll know when I see it."

“The alternative [to current policy] is not abandonment [of the Afghans] a la 1991-2 […] there are more cost effective and less intrusive ways to obtain US security objectives. The Taliban, with 30,000 men under arms and an annual budget of less than a billion dollars controlled 95 percent of the country […] they did a better job than we are doing.”