The Latest From Karzai

Give due credit to John Geddes at Maclean's for reporting on this matter almost a week before it actually happened. Unfortunately, Geddes' sources turned out to be correct: Afghanistan's president Hamid Karzai has now used a presidential decree to seize control of the Electoral Complaints Commission. That would be the same commission that brought to light the fraud involved in Karzai's re-election to the presidency last year, and which was expected to reveal any problems with the parliamentary elections due later this year. Now, Karzai has given himself the right to replace three independent, UN-appointed committee members (out of five in total) with anyone of his choice. The Economist reports:

Foreign activists were astonished by the president’s chutzpah. A former member of the ECC said he was too angry to comment. However, those diplomats who had once claimed that reform of the commissions was a non-negotiable condition were muted in their criticism. They know that in their various tussles with Mr Karzai over the years they have nearly always ended up on the losing side.

It is this latter point that ought to give us pause. Karzai is only president today because of the NATO-coalition that drove out the Taliban and that continues the often Sisyphean effort of keeping that movement's fighters at bay. How is it that the West appears to have little leverage over Karzai in this matter, when democracy in Afghanistan is supposed to be high on the list of goals of our mission there?

The problem is that the only thing with which the West can threaten Karzai is the withdrawal of its support, and he knows that threat is not credible. We have gone so far in convincing ourselves that a return of the Taliban is unacceptable that we seem more fearful of the movement that aims to topple Karzai's government than Karzai himself. The Afghan president, after all, has made it clear that he would like to come to terms with his enemies and include them in his government.

This is not to deny how bad the Taliban were and are. But if the endgame in Afghanistan, even with us there, is starting to look like a sham democracy that includes those much-reviled extremists, then we ought to seriously ask ourselves how much worse things would be if we were to withdraw ourselves from the situation completely. It is only by recognizing how much or how little we have to lose in abandoning a "friend" like Karzai that we can know whether we have any real leverage over him, and whether we really can stand up for Afghanistan's democracy or are going to end up fighting to impose a dictatorship there.