Hamid Kazai, following a finding by UN-backed investigators that nearly a million of the votes cast for him in the Afghan presidential election were fraudulent, has decided that he has not won a majority of the vote after all, and must stand for a run-off election November 7.
So what’s a million votes or so gone wrong? If the man wins in November, he’s the head of a legitimate government, right? And if there’s a legitimate government in Kabul, doesn’t that mean there’s something to fight for here, something a bit more substantial than shadows and dust to grab hold of and shape into an alternative to the Taliban?
Why are we even having this discussion? Having backed corrupt warlords in poverty-stricken Third World settings going back six decades to Chiang Kai-shek in China (remember Chiang Kai-shek? Syngman Rhee? Ngo Dinh Diem? Nguyen Van Thieu? Nguyen Kao Ky? Big Minh? Little Minh?), why should we think this approach is a winner?
Even if Karzai isn’t a hollow substitute for a truly national leader who’s been installed, certified, and propped up by piles of outside guns and money, that’s exactly what he looks like, particularly after he’s been caught stealing hundreds of thousands of votes and has his Western handlers force him to give the election back.
Essentially we’ve got this guy saying, “Oops, I guess that was a sleazy, brazen power grab. Now I’ll run again, this time not as Al Capone, but as George Washington.”
And this is the rock we’re going to build a strategy around? Maybe Afghanistan will never be a real country. Maybe General McChrystal is just looking for a guaranteed 30-year gig. Maybe al-Qaeda isn’t even in Afghanistan.
Definitely the Taliban are crazy, vicious, fundamentalist authoritarians, but they’re the local boys, and at this point, Pashtun or not, Karzai might as well be the candidate from Iowa.
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