Although we’d finished the guts of the assessment well before the sixty-day deadline of August 30, Secretary Gates directed me to hold the document until after the August 20 Afghan election. He would ask for it then. Given the likely impact of the assessment, the secretary no doubt wanted to ensure that we provided it to the appropriate policy makers before it received wider distribution and scrutiny.
After the long meeting, I sensed Secretary Gates reluctantly accepted the analysis, but recognized the challenge of convincing some in D.C. Its reception would inevitably be affected by factors beyond my view there, but I resolved to try to steer clear of politics. That wasn’t always easy. An August visit by a delegation led by Senators John McCain, Joseph Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham had included a pointed exchange in which I declined to outline the recommendations I would provide to President Obama regarding U.S. force levels in Afghanistan. I knew the friction wasn’t personal. It reflected the passion that the intersection of policy and politics engenders. But I wanted no part of it.
I left Belgium that afternoon knowing our prescription would be a tough sell. Its reception would hinge, in large part, on how the Afghan presidential elections went.
* * *
The elections were already controversial when I arrived in June. After intense wrangling, the date had been pushed from April. There were accusations that President Karzai was unfairly maneuvering to disadvantage potential opponents. Additionally, foreign involvement, including some foreign diplomats’ energetic search for opposition candidates, had produced an atmosphere of skepticism and distrust among many Afghans.
For outsiders, the world of Afghan politics was a baffling recipe of ethnicities and personalities seasoned with corruption and intrigue. Even a small taste could produce painful heartburn. Afghans were used to it. The mix of economic, tribal, historical, and personal relationships that produced the colorful swirl of their political scene could frustrate and even enrage them. But they seemed to understand it. The worst amassed power and wealth with callous arrogance. The best cut deals, paid bribes, and even for the best of motives, played by rules they hoped to someday change. The Uzbek commander Abdul Rashid Dostum became the poster child of shifting Afghan loyalties when he turned to, and then against, the Taliban in 1996. But he reflected a long tradition. Often called intractable, Afghan culture was rooted in practicality and compromise.
The election stakes were high. Afghans would select their chief executive for the next five years, a time when the immediate future of that nation and the outcome of NATO’s and America’s effort in the country would likely be decided. For a weary international audience, and an increasingly worried Afghan electorate, the conduct of the election would be an important metric—and, hopefully, a milestone in the maturation of the fledgling democracy. For ISAF and our Afghan security-sector partners, success in securing a complex election conducted across the country could spur needed improvements and build confidence.
By August, thirty-two candidates were running for president. Karzai, after having been appointed to the office in 2002 and elected by Afghans to a five-year term in 2004, was the clear favorite. But the choices he made that summer for running mates—Marshal Mohammad Fahim, a northern Tajik, and a Hazara, Karim Khalili—worried some onlookers, who hoped for a new crop of leadership to supplant the existing power brokers whose roots were in the country’s civil war. Karzai’s main rival was another northerner, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, a confidant of the late Ahmad Shah Massoud and Karzai’s foreign minister until 2006. The candidates included a number of other prominent Afghans—including Dr. Ashraf Ghani, a well-respected Pashtun economist and onetime minister of finance, and Ali Jalali, the former interior minister and a journalist by trade. Throughout the summer, Karzai polled at roughly 45 percent of the vote, but Afghanistan’s constitution required that a runoff be held if no candidate won at least 50 percent.
From a security standpoint, I’d been tracking the upcoming elections for almost a year. Dave McKiernan’s troop request, which had been a focus of ours in the Pentagon, had identified the need to increase security for the elections, particularly in the turbulent and largely Pashtun south. Now, although preparation for the elections had been under way for some months, there was much left to do. Soon after my arrival, detailed planning for Afghan-led security, backed up by Coalition support, moved into high gear. A credible election would require, at a minimum, making secure polling stations accessible to the vast majority of Afghans, even in physically remote or Taliban-controlled areas. It meant the Afghans, led by the government’s electoral body, the Independent Election Commission (IEC), needed to identify voting locations, hire staff to run them, and physically deliver and retrieve ballot materials, all the while protecting not only the polling sites but also protecting potential voters.