Last call

After being declared the winner of a drawn-out election process that started in August and ended with the boycott of the second round of voting of his closest opponent, Abdullah Abullah, Afghan President Hamid Karzai hit all the right notes. In his victory speech Karsai promised to build an inclusive government and to use all his powers to fight corruption.

"My government will be for all Afghans and all those who want to work with me are most welcome," Karzai said on Tuesday. The Afghan president's public invitation to work with his former political opponents came after a telephone call by US President Barack Obama in which he congratulated Karzai, but demanded that he had to start seriously fighting corruption and form a government that truly represented Afghan society. Other Western leaders had pressed Karzai in a similar fashion.

The situation in Afghanistan is dire. While the Taliban are steadily gaining ground and Western countries are reconsidering their strategy for the country, Afghanistan will now be led by a president whose campaign was guilty of massive election fraud and who failed to win the majority of votes required.

Fabrice Pothier, an Afghanistan expert and director of Carnegie Europe, calls the outcome of the election process "ugly." He believes that the attempt by the international community to create some sort legitimaticy for a new Afghan government by staging a runoff between Karzai and Abullah was doomed right from the start.

"I don't think it fooled anybody, including the Afghan people," says Pothier: "When I was in Afghanistan a few weeks ago, it was very clear that most Afghan people felt that there votes had been stolen in the first round and they viewed the Afghan government as part of the problem, not part of the solution. So I don't think an election would have changed anything."

Right decision

Despite the drawn-out election mess, the decision to cancel the runoff and declare Karzai the winner was correct, says Gunter Mulack, the director of the German Orient Institut who served as an EU election observer. He criticices the high public profile of the United Nations in Afghanistan. "It is again the fact, that the international community represented by UNAMA (United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan) and its head were too much in the media and were too much seen as really doing too much wheeling and dealing behind the scenes with Karzai. That was not good at all."

That led the Afghans to believe, adds Mulack, that their votes didn't count anyway and that the outcome of the polls was decided by the international community and the US.

The ultimate result of the election disaster is that "the United Nations' mission in Afghanistan is deeply discredited, deeply divided and you also need to rebuild the credibility of the international community, not only of the Kabul government," says Pothier.

To have any chance of a turnaround in Afghanistan, Western leaders must not believe in Karzai's public promises, but instead make concrete demands. In addition, they also urgently need to retool their own strategy for dealing with the country.

The international community should demand a say in the make-up of Karzai's cabinet to include politicians, argue the experts. What's more the international community should also issue clear deadlines for its demands and closely monitor the progress made by the government.

New strategy

But the Afghan government is not the only one to blame. In fact, the international community's entire Afghan policy is in desperate need of a makeover.

Even the foundation of the international strategy for Afghanistan, layed down in the so-called Bonn Process, was wrong, says Pothier. "We have now a constitution that was agreed in Bonn in 2001 that is one for a centralized country like France. Afghanistan is not going to be like this." Therefore the international community needs to work to rebalance the relation between the Afghan capital and the rest of the country.

The training of the Afghan army and police units also needs to be sped up and improved. Pothier criticizes that there is still no proper payment and promotion system in place that provides an incentive for Afghans to join the services and make a career there.

And perhaps most importantly, NATO must prioritize its tasks, instead of trying to fight all battles at once, a policy which Pothier calls the Helmand syndrome. "We are putting a lot of our combat resources to fight for a very small section of the population and the territory. We need to make strategic choices about what really matters." President Obama is currently doing exactly that, trying to come up with a new grand strategy for Afghanistan.

Observers say that unless both the new government and the international community get serious about those measures aimed at finally improving the lives of the Afghan people, the election debacle may prove to be the last nail in the coffin of international efforts to bring peace to Afghanistan.

Author: Michael Knigge
Editor: Rob Mudge