Just making sure we’re all up-to-date on the latest ‘President Obama Afghan Decision 09′ process.  Yesterday, the President met with a large bipartisan group of Congressmen and Senators with the major news coming out that he will not implement a major evacuation of American troops from Afghanistan nor fall back on orchestrating a strictly anti-Al Qaeda campaign.  In other words, a decision had yet to be made, but a serious withdrawal was off the table.  This news story probably doesn’t make those who feel that McChrystal’s recommendation for a large troop build up to implement a counterinsurgency campaign is the right way to go, feel too positive as the goal posts seem to have shifted a bit.  Today, Obama met with his NSC team to go over Afghan strategy, but I have not heard any links about what was said or decided.

Also of note was a fine analysis by Robert D. Kaplan on some of the geopolitical ramifications of the US presence in Afghanistan and what an American withdrawal or defeat might mean.  The analysis specifically focuses on China’ and India’s position in and on Afghanistan’s present and future.  Check it out.

Peter W. Galbraith, who was fired last week from his position with the UN as deputy special representative in Afghanistan, has come out swinging with a hard hitting piece in the Washington Post deriding the United Nation’s work in securing a free and fair Afghan Presidential Election.  Galbraith, who was basically fired by UN special representative to Afghanistan Kai Eide, scathingly denounces the August Presidential election as fraught with fraud that secured another term for President Hamid Karzai and blames the United Nations for failing to publicly support such a conclusion.  Well, now free from his UN post, Galbraith has decided to take his story and claim that the election was tainted beyond the pale to the American public.  Here’s a powerful segment:

Afghanistan’s presidential election, held Aug. 20, should have been a milestone in the country’s transition from 30 years of war to stability and democracy. Instead, it was just the opposite. As many as 30 percent of Karzai’s votes were fraudulent, and lesser fraud was committed on behalf of other candidates. In several provinces, including Kandahar, four to 10 times as many votes were recorded as voters actually cast. The fraud has handed the Taliban its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United States and its Afghan partners.

Galbraith claims that Eide refused to denounce the election results and numerous cases of fraud because he feared it would inflame ethnic tensions.  Galbraith of course has a different take and that is that an election seen as illegitimate by many in the country, especially Tajiks in the north, would undermine the Karzai government and as was stated ‘hand the Taliban its greatest victory.’  I personally sympathize with both arguments, but the accusations of voter fraud that Galbraith describes in the rest of his piece push one toward his position.  He showcases these occurrences below as examples of serious voter fraud in the August election:

- Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission (IEC), which was in charge of verifying the legitimacy of every vote and the election as a whole, was subservient to Karzai.

- At least 1,500 polling centers (out of 7,000) were to be located in places so insecure that no one from the IEC, the Afghan National Army or the Afghan National Police had ever visited them.

- Local commission staff members, who had access to many ballots and control over voting centers, were inexperienced, unchecked, and likely to be ’simply agents of the local power brokers, usually aligned with Karzai.’

I sympathize with Eide’s position of trying to keep things calm and under control in a nascent government’s second attempt at a major election, but blatant voter fraud, leading many of the populace feeling the election was illegitimate, can hamper greatly the government’s ability to effectively lead.

It is no surprise that reports like Galbraith’s cause the Obama administration pause in deciding how deeply involved we should be in Afghanistan.  It’s been widely known that Obama disapproves of Karzai and was widely shaken by the weakness of the August election and it is likely that these issues are causing the administration to delay making a decision on American strategy and resource deployment.  The under reported fact that Al Qaeda as a group has been remarkably diminished in recent years also plays a part in the administration’s calculus, no doubt.  However, a decision needs to be made on how the US is going to continue its mission in Afghanistan soon.  The deaths of 8 American soldiers yesterday sadly exemplifies the stakes at play.  Those soldiers were at a far flung base close to the Pakistan border,  significant because it’s these types of bases that will become less common as the US concentrates on protecting civilian areas, when they were massively attacked.  The Galbraith report brings to life a bit more how complicated this foreign policy decision is for the US, but decisions need to be decided sometime.

The Obama Administration is undertaking an intense, high-profile deliberation over what to do next in Afghanistan.  Accounts of this week’s White House meetings indicate a lively, open debate, punctuated by General Stanley McChrystal’s calls for increased troop levels, answered by skeptical questioning from Vice President Biden.

Some of this debate is being carried out in public.  McChrystal repeated his points in a speech in London on Thursday, the day after the Washington Post ran a front-page story indicating that U.S. intelligence and counter-terrorism operations had “significantly reduced” al Qaeda’s effectiveness.  On Friday, McChrystal met with Obama briefly while the President was in Copenhagen.

If al Qaeda has indeed been weakened, the argument goes, why do we need to deploy more troops in Afghanistan?  Can the U.S. devise a new strategy that would concede some role for some Taliban forces in Afghanistan, provided that they not frustrate our efforts to incapacitate al Qaeda?

By the same token, if the existing Karzai government in Kabul is so strongly called into question as a result of  its corruption and the fraudulent conduct of recent elections, does the United States have a local partner in Afghanistan worthy of support?  According to Peter Galbraith, former U.S. diplomat and until this week the second-ranking UN official in Afghanistan, the answer is no.  Speaking today on CNN, Galbraith said McChrystal’s plan was “highly questionable” given the election fraud.  “There is going to be a segment of the [Afghan] population that is not going to accept the authority of the government,” he told Wolf Blitzer.

Changing course now would have implications for U.S. policy throughout the region, including Pakistan and Iran, countries that have by turns aided or frustrated U.S. and NATO interventions in Afghanistan.

Neither Galbraith nor other experts on Southwest Asia, such as ex-US Ambassador to Pakistan Wendy Chamberlin, are criticizing Obama for stopping to take stock before making additional commitments.  In fact, they welcome it as perhaps the last opportunity for the White House to get the policy right, faced with the prospect that further troop commitments could lead to a Vietnam-like quaqmire.

“Pakistan is still a feudal society,” Chamberlin told a group of bloggers in Washington last week.  “The Taliban is very cleverly exploiting the current situation in Pakistan.  The promises made in Swat have not been kept.”

Across the border, in Afghanistan, the situation is even worse.  Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special envoy to the region, who witnessed first-hand the quicksand of America’s military engagement in Vietnam, must realize that the parallels are not comforting.