5 steps to better politics in Afghanistan

Posted By Paul D. Miller Tuesday, April 10, 2012 - 10:25 AM

This piece was crossposted from the Afpak Channel.

In 2014, Afghanistan is scheduled to hold its third presidential election since 2004, just 18 months after the next U.S. presidential inauguration, and at the height of the withdrawal of the international military presence. Then, just a year later, they are supposed to hold a legislative election in 2015. There is little prospect that either election will be adequately funded or competently administered. But even if, by some miracle, they come off without a hitch, they will only serve to entrench the corrupt, over-centralized administration in Kabul, and do little to improve governance in the localities. Holding elections in Afghanistan in the midst of its long-running political crisis is a lose-lose situation.

The United States and United Nations should work with the Afghans instead to push for a grand political bargain that could actually make a difference in the counterinsurgency against the Taliban: a new Loya Jirga to amend the constitution, devolve power, adjust the electoral calendar, change the voting system, and invite the Taliban to form a political party. Neither Kabul nor the international community stands to gain from holding another round of elections, but a new political bargain can break the paralysis in Kabul and break the logjam in talks with the Taliban.

I. Devolve Power

Afghanistan's slow-burning political crisis began in 2003, when a Loya Jirga convened in Kabul in December to ratify a new constitution. The new document was modeled closely on the 1964 constitution, itself following closely in the footsteps of constitutions in 1923 and the 1890s. That a new democratic constitution was modeled on the older constitutional monarchy is telling: The new system simply replaced the hereditary Afghan monarch with an elected President and retained on paper many of the centralized powers that the Afghan kings had claimed (though not always exercised) since the late 19^th Century. The new constitution was unanimously ratified by acclamation in January 2004.

The United States and the U.N. are often blamed for creating or forcing a centralized system onto the Afghans at the Bonn Conference in 2001. The accusation is wrong -- the centralized system came from the Afghans themselves, stemming from the century-old practice of Afghan rulers, and readily accepted by the Loya Jirga. But the point remains true that Afghanistan has one of the most highly centralized systems of government in the world. Provincial governments are not independent governments, like U.S. states, but implementing agencies of Kabul. Provincial councils are advisory, not legislative, bodies. Provincial governors and district chiefs are appointed by the president, not elected by the people. Provincial and district police chiefs are also appointed by the president, not by governors. That makes the president personally responsible for hiring and firing every governor and police chief in 34 provinces and nearly 400 districts nation-wide.

The centralization is almost completely unsuitable to Afghanistan's culture, economy, and society. According to Thomas Barfield's magisterial book, Afghanistan: A Political and Cultural History (arguably the most intelligent thing written on Afghanistan in a decade), the Afghan government has always claimed centralized powers, but has been most successful when it exercises those powers sparingly, or in cooperation with local elites like tribal elders and landowners. Efforts to use centralized government to compel social change tended to provoke resistance, as it did under the reign of the modernizing king Amanullah Khan (1919-1929), who was overthrown by a coalition of rural tribes and conservative mullahs; the communizing efforts of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (1978-1989); and the Islamizing efforts to the Taliban (1994-2001), the two most recent of which sparked civil war.

Despite the potential lessons of that history, the ten-year reign of Hamid Karzai looks more like Amanullah in his efforts to centralize power and push social reform, than that of Zahir Shah (1933-73), who took a more relaxed approach to the provinces and whose rule was marked by relative stability. Devolving power, for example by making governors elected and giving them the power of appointments in their province, giving provincial councils legislative power, and enabling provinces to levy their own taxes would bring the formal government into closer alignment with the informal practices that worked in the past.

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Who is in charge of U.S. humanitarian policy?

Posted By Mike Magan Thursday, March 29, 2012 - 12:27 PM

Yesterday, Josh Rogin highlighted testimony given by Peter Lavoy, acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asia and Pacific Security Affairs before the House Armed Services Committee about U.S. plans to not move forward with the 240,000 tons of North Korean food aid it had promised during recent meetings in Beijing. This decision was made as a result of North Korea's plans to launch a satellite into space, violating the moratorium they recently agreed to.

I have said previously that linking a U.S. humanitarian assistance program to the resumption of six party talks is a bad precedent. This type of action will lead many to believe that this would be a U.S. attempt to bribe the North Koreans to the table by taking advantage of a dire humanitarian situation.

Reports by U.S. non-governmental organizations working in North Korea are again saying that North Korean people are suffering from a severe shortfall in food supplies. This is not a new scenario for North Korea. The regime has continually struggled to feed its people since the famine of the mid 1990s, when over one million people lost their lives.

What is more shocking is the effect the many years of living on less than 1,700 calories a day have had on the general population. I saw this first-hand in a Pyongyang park in 2008 where some elderly people were quietly harvesting grass so they could supplement a meal. Today, a North Korean child can expect to be up to 7 inches shorter than his/her South Korean counterpart and 20 pounds lighter by adulthood.

Those in the NGO community with access to remote areas of the country have confirmed many in North Korea suffer from malnutrition and infection. In many cases, people outside of the capital are on the brink of fatal starvation.

Recently, five U.S. non-governmental aid agencies urged the U.S. government not to delay the provision of food aid, stating that "delay or potential cancellation of this program would violate humanitarian principles which hold that lifesaving assistance should not be used to achieve political aims." I couldn't agree more.

These five organizations have been working in North Korea for years, have first hand knowledge of the situation in-country, and have proved their ability to work alongside the World Food Programme to assure food assistance reached those most in need.

Where is Special Envoy Robert King in this scenario?

Why has the administration allowed the Department of Defense to announce food assistance has been halted?

It was Special Envoy King and a senior representative from USAID who were responsible for negotiating the resumption of food assistance during the March meetings.

It begs the question -- who is in charge of U.S. humanitarian policy in North Korea and what is the Obama administration's overall strategy?

Until a coherent strategy is articulated, questions will continue to be asked about the philosophical and practical origins of this administration's approach to humanitarian assistance and the need for North Korea to halt its nuclear agenda. These are, and should remain, separate issues.

Gerald Bourke/WFP via Getty Images

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Bin Laden's death and the al Qaeda debates, part three

Posted By Mary Habeck Wednesday, May 18, 2011 - 2:42 PM

Having looked in previous posts at two of the major analytical frameworks for understanding al Qaeda and bin Laden, it is now possible to examine the differing conclusions that each position might draw from the death of bin Laden.

Implications of the Majority Position

If the majority opinion on al Qaeda and bin Laden is correct, then the inspiration for a dying group is now gone and there are no similarly charismatic figures on the horizon. The putative deputy and successor of bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has seriously quarreled with other jihadists, alienating them over the course of the 1990s, and does not have the popular appeal that bin Laden had. Other potential leaders have drawbacks as well: Either they are too little known outside the group to be able to inspire devotion and therefore attacks or, like Zawahiri, they do not have the sort of personality that will be able to attract believers. Al Qaeda, as an organized group, could just fade away, losing whatever little cohesion it had with the death of the only person holding the loose confederation together. The tenuous connections that the group had with other jihadists in places like Somalia, Yemen, and northern Pakistan will certainly disappear, and these mujahideen are likely to return to righting national wrongs rather than focusing on the United States. Al Qaeda's appeal to the rest of the Muslim world could simply go away, replaced by a turn to the economic and political concerns that al Qaeda exploited to deflect support to the group.

The one remaining threat is the potential for revenge attacks, especially after the traditional 40-day mourning period. Once these are thwarted, there is little need to worry about attacks on the U.S., since other groups will return to local affairs, individuals in the U.S. and elsewhere will no longer be inspired to carry out attacks, and the tiny central core -- already decimated by U.S. strikes -- will be in hiding and unable to plot and plan. On Afghanistan in particular, the majority view would suggest that we now have a better chance than ever to peel away all the Taliban, even Mullah Omar's group, from al Qaeda. They had no loyalty to al Qaeda, only to bin Laden personally, and, with his death, their oath of fealty is no longer valid. If the U.S. is able to separate the Taliban from al Qaeda, then there is no reason for our troops to remain in the country. After all, al Qaeda was the real threat to Americans, not the Taliban.

The implications for Pakistan are also generally favorable based on a supposition that, as al Qaeda collapses as a group, the U.S. will be able to stop its strikes. This will neutralize the homeland threat from groups like the TTP, which were only talked into attacking the U.S. as revenge for the deaths of Pakistanis. Indeed, groups like the TTP will no longer have any ties to al Qaeda and should therefore switch their focus entirely to the Pakistani government. Even here the news is quite good, since that government and army were attacked because, at the behest of the U.S., they carried out incursions into Pashtun territory to find al Qaeda members. Without al Qaeda, the Pakistani Army can return to its bases, and therefore attacks by groups like the TTP will slowly but surely fade away.

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Obama and his generals

Posted By Peter Feaver Tuesday, June 22, 2010 - 10:03 AM

President Obama's awkward relations with his senior military commanders have just taken a turn for the worse - much worse. A new article for the Rolling Stone, released in advance to reporters, dishes all sorts of gossipy dirt on what General McChrystal - or more precisely, what McChrystal's staff - really thinks about the key principals on Obama's National Security Council team. Alas, McChrystal and his staff do not think very highly of them, and they were foolishly willing to share their low opinions with an obliging reporter.

The put-downs are remarkably sophomoric -- "Biden? Did you say: Bite me?" -- and the entire affair reads like a bad high school feud (cue the writers of Glee looking for material for next season). Like a petty high school feud, this new flare-up is just the latest round in a back-and-forth that has gone on for a long time; it is following a script that was predictable long ago. I do not know whether the reporting timelines support this inference, but it sure seems to me like the Rolling Stone story was McChrystal's staff retaliating for the equally disturbing attacks on McChrystal and Petraeus by White House political advisors in Jonathan Alter's semi-authorized account of the Afghan Strategy Review.

McChrystal has already apologized and his apology seems sincere. But it may not be enough to save his head from this famously thin-skinned White House. The last time a senior military commander spoke this unwisely to a reporter, he quickly resigned, and rightly so because his bad behavior thoroughly squandered whatever confidence his chain of command had in him by that point. McChrystal has a stronger battlefield record and so may have started with a bit more confidence to squander. Moreover, President Obama may not want the painful confirmation hearings for McChrystal's successor that a hasty departure would generate. And the McChrystal interview accurately notes that other members of the Obama AfPak team are already on beltway insiders' short-lists to leave, opening up the possibility of widespread chaos at the top during the most critical year of the war so far. Obama might be wiser to bring McChrystal in for a tongue lashing and send him back into the fight as quickly as possible.

If Obama takes that course, he should also tongue-lash the other participants in this feud, namely his closest circle of White House advisors and his country team in Kabul. The Americans seem to be preoccupied with Washington enemies when they should be directing their fire at the real enemy -- the one that is firing bullets, not insults, at them. Indeed, the dissension and back-biting that has characterized the Obama administration is precisely the sort of divide-and-conquer confusion we are trying to foster among the Taliban and Al Qaeda foes we are confronting in the AfPak theater. It is a tragic irony that we have proven more capable of sowing it among our own ranks than among the ranks of the enemy.

Good civil-military relations and the unity of command and effort they engender may not be sufficient to win. But in a war this complex, they may be a necessary condition for success. President Obama has not yet achieved good civil-military relations in the conduct of his wars and he does not have much time to get it right. Let us hope that he finally heeds the wake-up call, however discordant and unfortunate it is.

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How do we deal with Hamid Karzai?

Posted By Christian Brose Thursday, August 6, 2009 - 9:38 PM

By Christian Brose

If you have not yet read Elizabeth Rubin's profile of Hamid Karzai, forthcoming in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, drop whatever you're doing and get cracking. What's remarkable is that she manages to paint Karzai in a genuinely sympathetic light while still absolutely burying him. The reasons to approve of this latter conclusion are much discussed, well understood, and well deserved. To that, Rubin adds color and texture and detail and some damn good anecdotes (like this little dagger that Karzai's reputed drug-runner brother hurled at him: "Well, Hamid, at least I'm only ruining Kandahar. You're ruining the whole country.")

But as much as it deserves repeating, for it threatens to cripple the entire U.S. war effort, the story of Karzai ruining Afghanistan is more familiar. What we often forget is just what a truly awful, thankless job the man has, and Rubin's piece captures this with beauty and empathy. Like here:

At the end of the workday, the president takes a brisk 10-minute walk. When I followed after him one cold evening, 10 men or more covered him as he walked along. His cellphone rang. He slipped aside. The men tried to stay near. Assassins have repeatedly tried to kill Karzai. A bullet just missed him in Kandahar in 2002. In 2007, he was rocketed during a speech in Ghazni, between Kabul and Kandahar — but he stayed onstage. He insisted on holding an Independence Day parade last year despite security warnings. And sure enough, a well-trained hit squad fired on the parade, killing several officials and narrowly missing the president. For the last two years security has been so tight, friends say, that the president is getting what they call the Arg syndrome. Sometimes at night he has been known to slip out of the palace with a bodyguard in a beat-up car just to drive around Kabul and see what’s going on. He will express surprise, delight, even, at the new buildings and sights.

It's worth reminding ourselves that being president of Afghanistan is a nearly superhuman task. And I feel like that is something George Bush understood better than Barack Obama has thus far, as ironic as that may seem for all of the latter's talk of empathy. Yes, the Bush team screwed up plenty in Afghanistan, and we're trying to unwind that legacy now. But Bush seemed to understand that, in a fragile war-torn country like Afghanistan -- or Iraq, for that matter -- a country with virtually no effective institutions to speak of and where people are trying to build them out of whole cloth, strong U.S. support for individual leaders is often the most realistic way to get your local partners to make difficult but important decisions under extremely tough circumstances.

What's more, as Rubin illustrates, Karzai is intensely paranoid by nature, made even more so by the paranoia-producing politics of Afghanistan. And I think Bush empathized with and understood how to manage someone of that psychology -- by keeping him close, building him up, encouraging him, reassuring him, talking with him weekly, even erring on the side of being too supportive, but then using the confidence you've built to bring the hammer down when needed and push him to make tough but necessary decisions that he otherwise wouldn't make. (Pressuring Karzai to sack Mohammed Fahim in 2004 comes to mind, which Karzai now tells Rubin was a bad idea -- evidence of what a good idea it probably was.) This, by the way, was roughly the same approach that Bush (read: Ryan Crocker and David Petraeus) adopted with another weak, paranoid leader of a ravaged country at war: Maliki in Iraq. And in that case, it worked well. Maybe too well.

The empathetic approach to Karzai has its risks, of course -- chief among them that we aren't tough enough with him, he walks all over us, and then for our trouble we're perceived by most Afghans as propping up a leader they are increasingly frustrated with. That said, the Obama administration has been pursuing the alternative model, and it may be working out worse.

One of the first things the Obama team did -- aside from repeatedly dumping on Karzai anonymously in public -- was scrap the weekly video conference he had with Bush. All of this sent Karzai an unequivocal signal that he was losing the full support of his biggest ally, which only fueled his paranoia. So he did what any weak, suspicious, self-doubting president of Afghanistan would do: He hedged his bets. He reached out to all of the different factions in the country, and he cut deals to build the broadest possible base of support for himself in the run up to this month's election. This means that he has brought some utterly awful individuals, warlords and murderers and thugs, onto his ticket. As an act of political self-preservation, it was a master stroke, but if Karzai is reelected, it may render his future government ineffective, and with it Obama's policy.

Maybe we could have done more to cultivate a credible alternative to Karzai (though I get the sense that Holbrooke and Eikenberry have worked pretty hard on that). Maybe Karzai will undergo a Maliki-like transformation into a more effective leader. Maybe he will lose the election anyway. Maybe. Ultimately, the United States will go to war with the president of Afghanistan we've got, not the one we want. And if that man is Hamid Karzai, we'd better figure out how to make him the best Hamid Karzai possible -- or, perhaps more realistically, the least bad, least self-destructive, and least threatening to our mission. As for where to find an answer to that question, Elizabeth Rubin's article is the best place to start.

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Shadow Government is a blog about U.S. foreign policy under the Obama administration, written by experienced policy makers from the loyal opposition and curated by Peter D. Feaver and William Inboden.