On September 17, Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission (IEC) declared President Hamid Karzai the outright winner of the August 20 presidential election with 54.6 percent of the vote. And since then, Karzai has been insisting that allegations of voter fraud were nothing more than a red herring being propagated by his arch rival (and sore loser) Abdullah Abdullah, the country’s former foreign minister.
This is why he expressed indignation (bordering on contempt) a few days ago when the United Nations Electoral Complaints Commission invalidated almost a third of his 3 million votes and recommended a runoff election. He even indicated that he had no intention of abiding by its findings, insisting that Afghanistan’s IEC disagreed vehemently with the methodology the UN commission used to determine which votes were fraudulent.
Therefore, it must have taken the kind of pressure American soldiers perfected at Abu Ghraib to get Karzai to change his tune. Indeed, he looked like an al-Qaeda hostage standing next to US Sen John Kerry this morning as he announced that he would participate in a runoff election on November 7 against Abdullah, after all.
But I don’t see how this is going to make Obama’s pending decision on troop deployment there any easier. Not least because everyone from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Sen Kerry himself has insisted that Obama will not send over any more troops until the Afghan government gets rid of corruption.
And, since the corruption UN officials uncovered at the presidential level is in fact endemic throughout the entire government, nobody believes there will be any change in this respect even if the next president could channel honest Abe Lincoln. This, alas, makes the outcome of the runoff election utterly irrelevant.
Accordingly, I urge Obama to stop his Hamletian dithering on this issue. In particular, he should ignore the (conservative) chicken hawks who are egging him on to surge troops in Afghanistan to follow the precedent President Bush set in Iraq.
Because the only instructive precedent here is the one President Johnson set in Vietnam, which should warn Obama not to allow a military quagmire to doom his presidency the way a similar quagmire doomed Johnson’s.
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* This commentary was originally published yesterday, Tuesday, at 5:21 pm
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