Afghan Elections

My second big analysis assignment in Afghanistan was to prepare an election report for the command, which I completed hours before I left in late February 2012. It wasn't a technical report, but I went through the available 2009 election documentation and pulled out some lessons learned which included the following. First, the command was not in the election business per se, but it was more in the business of providing security for elections. SOF didn't have enough people to provide security by themselves, so it was a matter of determining where their limited capabilities could best be used and how they could support other security forces including General Purpose Forces (GPF), the Afghan National Army (ANA), and Afghan National Police (ANP). In fact, due to the cultural sensitivities displayed by Afghans, it was determined that the best course of action was to be as invisible as possible on election day. Second, there is the matter of logistics, getting all the election officials and ballots transported to where they need to be is difficult in a country as large as Afghanistan. It was likely that there would be fewer ISAF planes and helicopters available in 2014 than in 2009, so that would need to be taken into consideration. Third, there was the matter of the larger context of the election. Would Karzai try to remain in office? What would the ISAF policy goals be in 2014? And what would the international aid situation be?

But a bigger question concerned what was hoped to be gained by the election. One of the phrases bandied about said that this was the international community's last, best chance to influence Afghanistan. My boss, COL Pat, placed a great deal of faith in the election, saying that it was going to bring about change for the better and get everybody in the country excited and moving in the right direction. Being a political economist, I was skeptical that mere elections could be that beneficial. This skepticism derived from the failure of Bush's Middle East democracy doctrine, which drew heavily on the work of Natan Sharansky generally and The Case for Democracy specifically, in which Sharansky argues that the primary goal of US foreign policy is to expand democracy. After having studied with Joshua Cohen, the co-author of On Democracy along with Joel Rogers, I was highly skeptical of democracy because most of his arguments seemed driven by affect, were historically unsupported, and did not take theoretical critiques seriously. Specifically, I'm thinking of Tocqueville's Democracy in America that I studied with Harvey Mansfield, which I found much more grounded, plausible, and convincing. Specifically, I felt more needed to be done with security, institutions, and development (as Mansfield and Tocqueville would argue) and less that elections would prove a singular palliative (as Cohen and Rogers would argue). I predicted that the 2014 elections would not go well.

Peter Bergen, however, has written an intriguing piece, "What if the Afghan Elections Actually Work?" that has me rethinking my position. Bergen tells the story how three internationally-trained doctors have emerged as the front-runners aided by their more domestically and militarily oriented Afghan "politicians" who some may call "warlords" (I'm not judging because Afghanistan is a rough place). Moreover, the Taliban are not as powerful as once thought, and the voter turnout is much larger than previously thought, all of which -- indeed! -- is cause for hope and optimism in a place that badly need it. Another consideration is that ISAF forces have decreased from more than 100,000 when I was there to less than 40,000 now, which may have a beneficial effect because international forces tended to do too much and would not let the Afghans learn through doing because that inevitably involved failing, which is something that SOF doesn't handle well. So for today let's celebrate the successful elections, but I'll be very interested to see what tomorrow brings.