Regarding the Afghan election, which is now headed for a runoff, the good news is that the vast majority of Afghans didn’t vote in the first place and probably are not paying much attention, since they are illiterate and mostly live in remote villages, many of which do not have radios. (That’s also a mouthful of bad news.)
There is no telling where Hamid Karzai and his weak, ineffective, corrupt government will lead. More certain is that we are entering a moment of truth. We will learn if Karzai cares more about himself or his people. Fraud occurred during the elections; this is established. Karzai’s presidency is very much in question; we all know that. Karzai has presided long enough, and the enemies only grew during his presidency. His government managed to pull off — amateurishly — an incredible fraud at the polls, and now this fraud is a major distraction to progress.
The enemies of Afghanistan must be celebrating every moment that we are distracted by Karzai’s antics. This is not like Iraq, where we can step back quickly. We must take ownership of Afghanistan. The current government is like a horse with no bones in its legs. It just lies there, eats, and gets in the way.
To take one example, the current government is making it increasingly difficult for foreigners to get visas to Afghanistan. A friend who has lived there for five years, Tim Lynch, is a retired U.S. Marine Corps officer who has watched the corrupt bureaucracy evolve. Normally Tim could get his visa renewed within half a day, but recently he spent an entire month of frustration on a visa renewal. This distracted him from a large project he is overseeing at Jalalabad that is providing a considerable number of jobs for Afghans.
I could go on for hours about the corruption and how the Karzai government is not facilitating progress but impeding it. Karzai is part of the problem. For some blunt, very plain-spoken accounts, see Tim Lynch’s blog.
— Michael Yon is an independent reporter whose work is reader-supported.