Afghanistan Parliamentary Elections

Apologies for my lack of coverage regarding the recent Afghanistan parliamentary elections, but I’ve been swamped with some of life’s other challenges…..basically my 4 month year old daughter’s unquenchable thirst for her dad’s attention. Anyhoo, many others have written on the subject, including Joshua Foust and some of his Registan.net colleagues. Here Foust describes some of bad and some of the good:

The New York Times reported that in Marjah, the scene of a high profile campaign to defeat the Taliban in a tiny, isolated farming community in central Helmand province earlier this year, almost no one voted. This area was meant to be the showcase for America’s newest counterinsurgency techniques, an example of how the military’s knowledge about fighting this sort of war would lead to less violence, more participation in government and less local support for the insurgency. While the U.S. Marines who were interviewed said that local Afghans wanted to vote but felt they could not, the Marine Corps’ basic inability to provide sufficient security for an important national election should raise questions about how well the government is gauging its own effectiveness. More importantly, this shows that Afghans don’t necessarily believe the promises of ISAF and their own government that they are capable of providing security.

But all is not doom and gloom. Michael Cohen, a senior fellow at the American Security Project who was in northern Afghanistan as an election observer, reported that in Samangan, there was “no obvious fraud,” and that the voting process was “quite efficient and well-handled.” And that’s an important point to consider as well: it is really “sexy,” in a way, to talk about violence during the election; it is less interesting to talk about what went well. Jed Ober, the chief-of-staff of Democracy International, which fielded 80 observers in 15 provinces, told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that the election showed some really positive signs. And that’s worth considering, especially since it’s so soon afterward that we simply cannot know the complete picture of the election.

Foust then concludes:

this election has raised the troubling prospect of ending one pernicious drag on Afghanistan’s society and replacing it with one almost as pernicious — reducing violence but massively increasing already massive fraud. I’m not sure that is an improvement, overall.

On a slightly less depressing note, Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy reports that US officials in Afghanistan are in part using the election…

to train the bureaucrats that will run the local and provincial governments that will be crucial to increasing the Afghan government’s credibility.

…..A significant part of this effort consists of a U.S. Agency for International Development-funded program, which gives thousands of Afghan government officials a crash course on governing and anti-corruption techniques. After the program concludes, these officials are then sent out to form the foundation of Afghanistan’s civil service.

The U.S. government funds and supports the Afghan Civil Service Institute, the makeshift university in Kabul where bureaucrats are trained, through the Afghan Civil Service Support Program, which was launched last February. The institution, which is Afghan-run but U.S.-supported, has graduated 11,000 sub-national government officials and expects to reach a total of 16,000 by the end of the year. It teaches five basic bureaucratic functions: procurement, strategy and policy, human resources, project management, and finance.

Oh, and did Bob Woodward write anything on America’s Afghan strategy and policy making recently? He did! I’ve got some work to do.

(Photo: Foreign Policy)