SOLE OPTION

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1141006/jsp/opinion/story_18878917.jsp#.VDHh8_mSzb4

Gwynne Dyer

“We have to recognise that Afghanistan will not be a perfect place, and it’s not America’s responsibility to make it one,” said President Barack Obama last May. No, it isn’t, and Afghanistan is a strikingly imperfect society in almost every respect: politics, economy, security and human rights. But it isn’t entirely a lost cause, either.

Hamid Karzai, who was given the job of running Afghanistan after the American invasion and, subsequently, won two deeply suspect elections in 2004 and 2009, finally left office although he didn’t move very far. (His newly built private home backs onto the presidential palace.) On the way out, he took one last opportunity to bite the hand that fed him for so long. “The war in Afghanistan is to the benefit of foreigners,” he said. “Afghans on both sides are the sacrificial lambs and victims of this war.” The US ambassador, James Cunningham, said that “his remarks, which were uncalled for,... dishonour the huge sacrifices Americans have made here,” but they were, of course, true.

Over 1,400 American soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan, and they all died for a particular US official vision of how American security might be best assured. How else could the 13-year US military commitment in Afghanistan possibly be justified to the American people? As to whether the long occupation was also in Afghanistan’s interest, that depends very much on the stability and success of the two-headed potential monster of a government that is now being created in Kabul.

Two is company

Karzai has handed over the reins of power to two very different men after five months of bitter disagreement over which one of them had really won the last presidential election. It was not as blatantly rigged as either of the two elections that maintained Karzai in the presidency, but it was still pretty dodgy. In the first round of voting, when there were 11 candidates, the leader was Abdullah Abdullah, with 45 per cent of the vote, and the runner-up was Ashraf Ghani, with only 31 per cent. In the second round, Abdullah Abdullah’s vote actually dropped two points to 43 per cent, while Ashraf Ghani’s almost doubled to 56 per cent.

Even more suspiciously, the number of people voting in some of the districts that supported Ashraf Ghani tripled between the first and second rounds of voting. So Abdullah Abdullah cried foul, and the inauguration of a new president was endlessly postponed while the ballots cast were “audited” by an electoral commission that had been chosen by Karzai. There was never going to be a clear answer to the question of who really won the election, and so after months of drift and delay a deal was struck. Ashraf Ghani, a former senior official at the World Bank, will be president. Abdullah Abdullah, a former resistance fighter during the Soviet occupation and later foreign minister under Karzai, will nominate a “chief executive officer” who will act more or less as prime minister. It is a traditional Afghan carve-up, with a proportional slice of power for every one of the country’s ethnic groups. Ashraf Ghani will ensure that Pashtuns get the biggest share of the good jobs, and look after the Uzbeks as well. Abdullah will take care of the Tajiks and Hazaras.

After nearly three decades of Russian and American occupation, a significant minority of Afghans have been exposed to many examples of how post-tribal societies run their affairs. Afghanistan is still a tribal society, so this carve-up of power on an ethnic basis may be a better option for the country than winner-takes-all politics. And if the US and its allies do not abruptly cut off the foreign aid, post-occupation Afghanistan may avoid a rerun of the disastrous civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal and the ending of Soviet subsidies.