(September 16, 2009 - Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images AsiaPac)
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has declared today that he was in fact no the outright winner of a recent presidential election and will enter into a runoff election to decide the true victor. An independent election commission – sent to Afghanistan by the UN – determined that there was wide-spread corruption and threw out thousands of ballots lowering Karzai’s total to less than 48%. There had been great concern about the legitimacy of the results as many believed that Karzai failed to gain a majority required to claim the presidency without a run-off. The runoff election will see Hamid Karzai face off against his Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah. The Afghan Constitution calls for the election to be held in the next two weeks.
It cannot come soon enough for the Obama administration who has very publicly said it will not make a decision on further troop deployments or strategy in Afghanistan until their government attains a relative level of stability.
What does any of this really mean? It means that Afghanistan is far more screwed up than many would have liked to believe it was. Anyone with a brain could have predicted that this election was a sham, but it is somewhat encouraging that Karzai was willing to admit it. As for how this impacts US plans, it turns a bumbled mess into absolute chaos. The President has already drawn much deserved criticism from his military officers, as well as the Right, for his slow pace on a decision to deploy more troops to Afghanistan, but this will surely slow the effort even further. The prospect for stability is even further down the road than it was just a day ago – when we all just assumed this election was a sham. Now that we have to wait two weeks for another fraud-filled fiasco, we may be waiting months before the government is up and running – or even longer if a coalition government is necessary to achieve a majority.
Yet again developing a plan for military action is a bad thing. It is no wonder more men are conservatives than women.
I am not sure if you were making a factual claim or a sarcastic remark there about women and conservatism, but I happen to believe there a quite a few of them out there. Perhaps, even more than you think. But yes, “plans” are a good thing – measure twice and cut once – but at some point you have to start putting hammer to nail before the house falls down around you.
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