Saving Afghanistan
In the year 2000, well before the tragic Sept. 11 attacks on the United States and the subsequent liberation of Afghanistan, a secret meeting took place in northern Afghanistan, one of the few areas not conquered by the Taliban. A man named Hamid Karzai, as part of a delegation representing the former king of Afghanistan, flew in to meet Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of the anti-Taliban United Front, and me to discuss the future of the country.
Our conversation might have seemed presumptuous, focused as it was on outlining a post-Taliban government. We discussed plans to exert pressure on the government of Pakistan to halt its support for the Taliban, who were now despised by the Afghan people, achieve military gains in the resistance against the insurgency, create an interim Afghan administration, convene a constitutional loya jirga to approve a constitution, and lastly to call for elections based on a simple idea: One person equals one vote.
Following 9/11 and the global response, these ideas became the structure for the future Afghan government. But today, despite incredible amounts of blood and treasure and unprecedented support from the United States and the international community, Afghanistan is perceived as on the brink of collapse, with the shadow of the 2014 withdrawal date casting a pall on everything from soldier morale to the economy.
Despite the overwhelming list of challenges, however, from corruption to an economy dependent on foreign aid, Afghanistan can still experience a successful political transition in 2014. For this to happen, all the stakeholders involved must stop thinking strictly in terms of military means.
Afghanistan arrived at this point through a tragic combination of errors, some internal and some external. The initial mistake was to entrust President Karzai with the sacred duty of securing the fate of our embattled nation. His lack of faith in his fellow countrymen is perhaps best exemplified by his request that the CIA, even before he was officially inaugurated as president, provide bodyguards to protect him not from al Qaeda but from the Afghans who helped install him in power. Despite high hopes, he has rarely pursued local support for his policies and alienated many U.S. and international partners with his xenophobic pronouncements, thus tainting any opportunity for genuine leadership.
Karzai's lack of trust led directly to the ill-conceived policy of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration, best described as Iraqi-style de-Baathification but in practice targeted against those who had fought as U.S. allies against the Taliban. The end result was a power vacuum that pitted a government with limited resources and capability against a nascent but determined and foreign-supported insurgency. Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's fateful decision to continue to view elements of the Taliban, and Islamic extremism more broadly, as a strategic asset for use in Afghanistan set the stage for the current conflict and fed the insecurity, while the United States became more focused on Iraq, Iran's nuclear program, and the rise of China.
Yet other obstacles to success in Afghanistan are much harder to quantify. The tolerance of the Afghan government and foreigners alike toward high-brow corruption has today become a significant threat to a stable Afghanistan, along with the Taliban. It would be a tragic mistake for the international community to conclude that democracy doesn't work in Afghanistan, while the only thing that doesn't work is democracy as Karzai's government understands it. The Afghan government has done little to ensure that the institutions of democracy, from our parliament to our courts and civil society, are supported and nurtured. Instead, it has confused the Afghan people by being passive toward corruption and pursuing an inconsistent and ambivalent policy regarding reconciliation with the armed insurgency. As the current Afghan government has repeatedly made clear, a red line of reconciliation with the Taliban must be their acceptance of the Constitution -- and Karzai needs to illustrate his own commitment to this same standard. No wonder Afghans feel no connection to this government and understand democracy to be code language for anarchy.
Abdullah Abdullah leads the National Coalition of Afghanistan, a collection of opposition political parties, and was the runner-up candidate for president in 2009.