More trouble ahead in Afghanistan

Given the current political and military issues in Afghanistan, I am reminded more about this among all my posts related to that country. In that op-ed way back in May, I wrote that the results of India's elections will not have any significant impact, but that the elections in Iran and Afghanistan are the ones that we ought to follow. I wrote there:

Afghanistan will hold its presidential elections in August. The current president, Hamid Karzai, has been heading the country since the Taliban-led government was driven out of power by the U.S. and NATO military forces. Karzai has been increasingly criticized for not being effective in the fight against the Taliban, who have been rapidly gaining ground both in Afghanistan and in neighboring Pakistan.

Meanwhile, Pakistan is dealing with a possibility that democracy might get suspended there by a military coup, thanks to the democratically elected government getting more and more unstable. Unfortunately, neither a weak government nor a military coup is new to Pakistan.

Thus, whether it is the UPA or the NDA that gets elected to power in India, there will not be as many repercussions as from the political developments over the next couple of months in Afghanistan, Iran and, of course, Pakistan. How events unfold in South and West Asia this summer will have immense implications even for those of us halfway around the world.

We know how that Iranian election went and, unfortunately, we do not know how the dissidents are being treated.

The elections in Afghanistan? Things could take an ugly turn. For one, Hamid Karzai's main challenger, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah has already set the stage for what might happen if he loses:

Dr Abdullah told the Daily Telegraph: "I think if the process doesn't survive, then Afghanistan doesn't survive.

"Because what does that mean? The same sort of regime that crafted this massive, massive rigging will be imposed upon Afghanistan for another five years.

"On top of whatever problems this government, this administration had, there will be its illegitimacy.

"We will exhaust all legal avenues. But finally, if it worked, all well, if it didn't we will not accept the legitimacy of the process and then this regime will be illegitimate."

Apparently, even Obama's and Clinton's main man there, Richard Holbrooke, has had some heated exchange of words with Karzai:

Dr Abdullah spoke out as reports emerged of a heated row over the election between Richard Holbrooke, Barack Obama's super envoy to the region, and Hamid Karzai over the election.

The two are said to have had "sharp exchanges" after Mr Holbrooke complained about ballot box stuffing from the Karzai campaign.

This will be more than anything that we saw in Iran when Ahmedinajad and Khamenei cooked up the election results. Why? Here is Fred Kaplan:

[If] the election turns out to be as close—and contested—as the early returns suggest, the new president will probably also have to offer a very high position to the runner-up, perhaps even form a unity government with him. If Karzai wins, the runner-up is likely to be the former foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah. There is another way to express this: If Karzai the Pashtun wins, the runner-up is likely to be Abdullah the Tajik. (Abdullah is half-Tajik but is considered the Tajik candidate.) In other words, if Karzai doesn't give Abdullah something big (or, should Abdullah win, if he doesn't give Karzai something big), the election could trigger an ethno-geographic conflict (Pashtuns live mainly in the south, Tajiks in the north), on top of the many layers of conflict that already keep Afghanistan from functioning as a coherent nation-state. This is one danger of holding a national election in a state that lacks a national consciousness or a civil society: The vote tends merely to politicize, and thus harden, longstanding social divisions. This is what happened in Iraq's first post-Saddam election.

Have a good day!