Afghan Elections: What's Obama to Do?

Dex­ter Filkins and Car­lotta Gall of the New York Times have a thor­oughly dispir­it­ing story today.

KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghans loyal to Pres­i­dent Hamid Karzai set up hun­dreds of fic­ti­tious polling sites where no one voted but where hun­dreds of thou­sands of bal­lots were still recorded toward the president’s re-election, accord­ing to senior West­ern and Afghan offi­cials here.

The fake sites, as many as 800, existed only on paper, said a senior West­ern diplo­mat in Afghanistan, who spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymity because of the polit­i­cal del­i­cacy of the vote. Local work­ers reported that hun­dreds, and in some cases thou­sands, of votes for Mr. Karzai in the elec­tion last month came from each of those places. That pat­tern was con­firmed by another West­ern offi­cial based in Afghanistan.

“We think that about 15 per­cent of the polling sites never opened on Elec­tion Day,” the senior West­ern diplo­mat said. “But they still man­aged to report thou­sands of bal­lots for Karzai.”

Besides cre­at­ing the fake sites, Mr. Karzai’s sup­port­ers also took over approx­i­mately 800 legit­i­mate polling cen­ters and used them to fraud­u­lently report tens of thou­sands of addi­tional bal­lots for Mr. Karzai, the offi­cials said.

The result, the offi­cials said, is that in some provinces, the pro-Karzai bal­lots may exceed the peo­ple who actu­ally voted by a fac­tor of 10. “We are talk­ing about orders of mag­ni­tude,” the senior West­ern diplo­mat said.

If this is true, and more and more anec­do­tal reports are indi­cat­ing that the scale of fraud was breath­tak­ingly brazen, then the U.S. has a real prob­lem. As the Times reports, “The Obama admin­is­tra­tion now faces the prospect of hav­ing to defend an Afghan admin­is­tra­tion for the next five years that is widely seen as illegitimate.”

And that’s huge. Espe­cially because the Euro­peans and oth­ers tak­ing part in ISAF are just look­ing for a rea­son to get out of Afghanistan. They have no stom­ach for prop­ping up an ille­git­i­mate gov­ern­ment, given the grow­ing oppo­si­tion to the war in Britain, France and Ger­many. British Prime Min­is­ter Gor­don Brown is espe­cially vul­ner­a­ble. With elec­tions com­ing up, the Con­ser­v­a­tive Party could almost cer­tainly win sim­ply by promis­ing to with­draw sup­port for a fraud­u­lent Karzai pres­i­dency and bring the troops home. And if Britain goes, so goes the rest of the Euro­pean con­tin­gent. The U.S. would be left alone in Afghanistan, as it is now in Iraq.

“Alone in Afghanistan.” Those words should send shiv­ers down the spine of any think­ing per­son, given the stakes in the region. For if Afghanistan falls back into a chaos of feud­ing war­lords, aggres­sive Tal­iban and blood­ied Amer­i­can forces, Pak­istan will feel it as well. And the world does not need a desta­bi­lized Pak­istan at this point, given its grow­ing Islamic mil­i­tancy, poten­tially loose nukes and con­tin­u­ing bor­der dis­putes with its neigh­bors. Afghanistan would become a black hole that could suck in the rest of the region—already bristling with atomic ten­sions. China, India, Pak­istan, Afghanistan, Iran and the Cen­tral Asian ’stans would have to become involved.

Yes, those are the stakes in Afghanistan, quite dwarf­ing America’s rel­a­tively nar­row national inter­ests of deny­ing al Qaeda a safe-haven (which already exist in Pak­istan) and curb­ing heroin pro­duc­tion. I believe Obama rec­og­nizes the per­ils of a desta­bi­lized South and Cen­tral Asia, but I’m not sure he knows quite what to do.

Afghanistan is look­ing more and more like Viet­nam every day, with its safe havens, for­eign inter­ven­tion and, now, a likely ille­git­i­mate gov­ern­ment. You even have the pos­si­bil­ity of a sort of domino the­ory. Does that make Obama another LBJ?