Anne Applebaum has a sensible column over in Slate arguing that what's important is not who wins the Afghan election -- but how the West engages with that winner.
Many people in the West would love to see Karzai lose his re-election bid (full disclosure: I'm one of them!). But if the Obama administration is really committing itself to a massive state-building campaign in Afghanistan, then it needs to engage constructively with whoever wins.
Meanwhile, Spencer Ackerman thinks NATO needs a better plan for providing post-election security, since the current plan appears to be "pray for the best."
If you were an Afghan in a far-flung area and you knew there was at least an outside chance that the Taliban would mutilate or kill you for voting and all you got from the NATO forces who say they'll protect you is an invocation to be brave and to trust the Afghan police and soldiers at the polling stations, would you bother voting?
This is a very serious-sounding, high-minded argument. It also makes no sense. If NATO was capable of curtailing Taliban operations in "far-flung area[s]," wouldn't NATO already be doing it?
The ultimate problem here isn't that NATO needs a better plan for stopping Taliban reprisals. It's that NATO, for a variety of reasons -- not enough troops, the decentralized nature of the Afghan population, the difficulty of identifying who really is Taliban -- simply cannot stop Taliban reprisals.
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Categories: Afghan Elections (2009), Afghanistan, Politics, Regional News, War and Terrorism, War in Afghanistan
Tags: Afghan elections, Anne Applebaum, Hamid Karzai, NATO, Spencer Ackerman, Taliban
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