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Afghanistan, United States

Why there’s reason for optimism about the Afghan troop drawdown

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US president Barack Obama earlier today announced that while most of the US military forces in Afghanistan, which currently number around 35,000, will leave the country later this year, a force of 9,800 will remain — and could remain through 2016.afghanistan flagUSflag

It’s still possible that under a new bilateral security agreement, which US officials hope to conclude later this year with the administration of Afghanistan’s next president, small numbers of US forces will remain even longer. But Obama’s remarks make it clear that US hostilities, by and large, will be over by the time his successor is elected in November 2016:

“Americans have learned that it’s harder to end wars than it is to begin them,” he said. “Yet this is how wars end in the 21st century.” 

Despite Mr. Obama’s attempt to draw to a close more than a decade of American military engagement in Afghanistan, the United States will continue to have thousands of troops engaged in lethal counterterrorism operations for at least two more years. He also acknowledged that the United States will leave behind a mixed legacy. “We have to recognize Afghanistan will not be a perfect place, and it is not America’s responsibility to make it one,” he said. “The future of Afghanistan must be decided by Afghans.”

In a June 14 runoff, Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister, who is half Pashtun and half Tajik, will face Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, a former finance minister and World Bank official, who is Pashtun. After the first round of the election, Abdullah led with 44.94% to just 31.47% for Ghani. The outgoing president, Hamid Karzai, who has held the office since late 2001, has had increasingly difficult relations with the Obama administration, and he has refused to sign a status-of-forces agreement regarding future US security arrangements. Both Abdullah and Ghani, however, have rushed to assure Afghans that they will prioritize a US-Afghan security agreement.

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RELATED: Afghanistan hopes for calm as key presidential election approaches

RELATED: Did Abdullah just with the Afghan presidency?

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Abdullah, who recently won the support of the third-place candidate, Zalmai Rassoul, until recently Karzai’s foreign minister. Rassoul was widely seen as Karzai’s unofficial candidate, due to his recent role in the Karzai administration and the endorsement he won from Karzai’s brother. Rassoul won strong heavy in Kandahar province, Karzai’s home power base.

That makes that Abdullah has the ethnic and tribal arithmetic on his side, making his the strong favorite to win the June 14 runoff. Pashtuns, which comprise around 42% of Afghanistan’s population, have traditionally held political power in Afghanistan, including Karzai, within the Taliban and the Afghan monarchy that ruled the country for nearly three centuries until its overthrow in 1973.

Tajiks, which comprise around 27% of the population, are predominant throughout northeastern Afghanistan, and are the largest ethnic group in Kabul. They played a predominant role in the Northern Alliance that assisted US forces topple the Taliban government in 2001.

Not everyone, however, is sanguine about Afghanistan’s post-US future. Max Fisher, writing at Vox, takes a pessimistic line over the eventual drawdown:

The bad news is that the administration is tacitly confirming what everybody already knew: the war against the Taliban is not one that the US believes it can win, so we’re going to stop trying. That war, Afghanistan’s war, is going to continue….

The Afghan military has been problematic from the beginning: it runs on US funding and is plagued with desertions. Another year of US help is not likely to turn them into a victory force. President Obama’s declaration that this will help the Afghan military “stand on its own” is just not very likely.

But the Taliban was never likely to strike a peace deal with the United States, and despite attempts at peace talks, it’s hard to imagine that there’s any cultural or political space for the Taliban and its insurgent allies to engage in seriously negotiations with the United States. 

That’s not the same, however, as an Abdullah administration or a Ghani administration striking a deal with the Taliban.  Continue reading Why there’s reason for optimism about the Afghan troop drawdown →

Afghanistan

Did Abdullah just win the Afghan presidency?

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Earlier this week, leading Afghan presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah secured the endorsement of Zalmai Rassoul, the third-place finisher in the April 5 first-round election. That brings Abdullah, a former foreign minister and the runner-up to outgoing president Hamid Karzai in the flawed 2009 presidential election, the strong frontrunner in an anticipated runoff likely to be held on June 14. afghanistan flag

Although results are due to be finalized Thursday (delayed for a day due to the high volume of serious complaints about the voting), Abdullah leads in the preliminary results with 44.94% of the vote, and if he wins the presidency, it will give the country’s Tajik ethnic minority a key role in policymaking in the years ahead.

Abdullah (pictured above, center, with Rassoul, right), who is half-Pashtun and half-Tajik, served as a chief aide to the late Ahmad Shah Massoud, a top Tajik commander of the Northern Alliance, which helped sweep the Taliban out of power in 2001-02. That gives Abdullah credibility among Afghanistan’s two most important ethnic groups. His running mate, Mohammad Khan, is a former leader of Hezb-i-Islami, a Pashtun insurgent group not incredibly unlike today’s Taliban insurgency.

His nearest challenger is Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, a former World Bank official and former Afghan finance minister. Ghani was trailing with 31.47% in the latest count, enough to power him to a runoff against Abdullah — but perhaps too deep a deficit to defeat Abdullah in the second round, given that Abdullah’s first-round total suggests he’s only 5.06% away from securing an outright majority.

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RELATED: Afghanistan hopes for calm as key presidential election approaches

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Rassoul, who won just 11.48% of the vote served until very recently as Afghanistan’s foreign minister, and he ran with the support of  Karzai’s brother, Quayum Karzai, who dropped out of the presidential race earlier this spring. Though Rassoul didn’t win Karzai’s official endorsement, he’s widely seen as the candidate of the outgoing administration, and his support drew mainly from Pashtun tribes loyal to Karzai in southern Afghanistan.

In the country’s politics, building a presidential majority is less about winning over individual voters on the basis of ideology, but about cobbling together a majority from among the country’s ethnic groups. Pashtuns, largely dominating the south and east of the country, constitute around 42% of the population, and as the most populous group, have typically dominated politics — in the royal era, the Soviet era, the Taliban era and the Karzai era since 2001.

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Tajiks, however, are the most dominant group in Kabul and throughout Afghanistan’s northeast, constituting 27% of the population. Uzbeks, 9% of the population, predominate in the north-central part of the country and Hazaras, which constitute another 9% of the population, live in the central highlands of Afghanistan.

Ghani’s running mate, Abdul Rashid Dostum, is a leading Uzbek warlord, and Ghani had hoped to build a coalition based on winning the largest share of the Pashtun vote and bringing along the Uzbek vote as well.

You can see how ethnic ties play a role in the preliminary election results in this map from the indispensable website Electoral Geography. Ghani was the top candidate in much of the Pashtun and Uzbek heartlands. Rassoul was the top candidate in the southern province of Kandahar, the home of the Karzais. Abdullah dominated the rest of the country, including the Hazara highlands, Kabul and the Tajik northeast.

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Continue reading Did Abdullah just win the Afghan presidency? →

Afghanistan

Afghan election results: Abdullah lead grows

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In what must be one of the world’s slowest vote-counting exercises, most of the results of Afghanistan’s April 5 election have now been tallied, and frontrunner Abdullah Abdullah’s lead is growing in his bid to succeed outgoing president Hamid Karzai.afghanistan flag

With around 82% of the votes now counted, Abdullah leads with 43.8%, followed by Ashram Ghani Ahmadzai, a former World Bank official and finance minister, who is winning 32.9%. Zalmai Rassoul, until recently Karzai’s foreign minister, was in third place with 11.1%.

Though Abdullah’s lead has grown steadily throughout the vote count, he won’t achieve the absolute majority he would otherwise need to avoid a runoff against Ghani, which would take place after May 28 — likely in June. 

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RELATED: Afghanistan hopes for calm as key presidential election approaches

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A report in The New York Times over the weekend indicated, however, that Abdullah (pictured above with Karzai in 2004) is already on the verge of winning Rassoul’s support, which could power Abdullah to a convincing runoff victory against Ghani by bringing southern Pashtun tribes close to Karzai into his ethnic and political coalition. Though the outgoing president hasn’t endorsed a candidate in the race, Rassoul is widely seen as the candidate of the Karzai administration, and Karzai’s brother, Quayum Karzai, dropped out of the race in March and endorsed Rassoul. 

In the meanwhile, despite some horrific violence in the weeks leading up to the election, the Taliban, which is boycotting the vote, has been remarkably quiet, notwithstanding expectations that it would be working hard to undermine safety during the election campaign. Some analysts believe that the Taliban is waiting until the runoff vote to achieve maximum disruption, but the lull might actually mean that Abdullah and Ghani and their supporters are negotiating behind the scenes with key Taliban leaders. 

So what does this mean for Afghanistan — and for the US military presence there? Continue reading Afghan election results: Abdullah lead grows →