Election lessons

By Anatol Lieven Let me say at the beginning that I do not think that the existing mess in Afghanistan at present is the fault of the Obama administration. The president inherited it from George Bush, and simply did not have time between taking power in January and the Afghan elections of this month to carry ...

By Anatol Lieven

By Anatol Lieven

Let me say at the beginning that I do not think that the existing mess in Afghanistan at present is the fault of the Obama administration. The president inherited it from George Bush, and simply did not have time between taking power in January and the Afghan elections of this month to carry out a radical change of course. If, however, the administration fails to change course after the (predictable) debacle that these elections have become, then the responsibility for subsequent disasters will indeed rest with President Obama and his team.

The Afghan election has lessons that go far beyond Afghanistan. It illustrates the folly of relying on democracy and elections to provide solutions to complex issues of state-building, absent a whole set of other preconditions. One of these is for Washington to have a clear idea of what election results it wants, what election results are possible and what if anything it can do to influence those results.

Instead, both the Bush and Obama administrations drifted along with the Afghan electoral process, the results of which were always going to be a choice between the very bad and the absolutely disastrous; and were then going to have to explain to the American public and the publics of key U.S. allies (notably Britain) why bringing about this awful choice was worth the lives of dozens of U.S. and allies troops. It now seems likely that more British soldiers have died in Helmand province over the past four years than Afghan citizens voted there in the first round of these elections. How do you explain that to those soldiers’ parents, wives and children?

(Continue reading.)

Anatol Lieven, a senior editor at The National Interest, is a professor in the War Studies Department of King’s College London and a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation. This piece was originally published at the National Interest online.

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