Bombs at the headquarters of NATO, rockets near the presidential palace, threats on the doorsteps of potential voters that their ink-stained fingers will be cut off by week's end — the Taliban are about as subtle as a heart attack. Pundits like to say that two back-to-back transfers of power in Afghanistan mean democracy is emerging, but when the man in power won both elections and, before that, was handpicked for the job by the intervening superpower that toppled the previous regime, the goal of democracy seems illusory — especially when that deposed regime, now resurgent and reappearing near the seat of power, controls more than a third of the countryside, and threatens half as much more.
It is against this backdrop — even amidst tightening poll numbers abroad and unsurprising findings last night that Americans back home are sick of the war there — that Afghanistan finds itself today on the brink of re-electing President Hamid Karzai as he counts heads and the surging Taliban count digits... on the people's bloody hands, not at the polling stations. Not that President Barack Obama's administration seems to care as much as the White House would have you believe; it's busy spending money on a virtually impenetrable blockade of the Taliban, Pakistan, and eventually Al Qaeda, all the while handpicking another successor of its own.
And it's not Karzai, who has turned himself into the world's most outrageous walking contradiction: the man from one ethnic group (the southern Pashtuns) putting an aristocratic face on the corrupt central government dominated by another (the northern Tajiks); our would-be Man in Kabul promising peace talks with the (overwhelmingly Pashtun) Taliban while courting (non-Pashtun) warlords for top government slots; the man who fancies himself Afghanistan's version of Gandhi — only with a far nattier wardrobe, far more bodyguards, and a far darker heart.
Despite all this (and initial reports of high turnout in the north), Karzai is expecting the tribes — and, more importantly, the Taliban — to make peace at least for one day (did he not see those rockets in the sky?) and hand him the majority he needs to avoid the world's second destabilizing run-off of the year, thus legitimizing his increasingly impotent presidency. And Obama is betting the Pentagon's new budget — and, more importantly, his own re-election — that he can immediately push Karzai to the side and increase to as many as 60,000 troops to get the majority of support he doesn't have into the heart of the destabilized region, thus legitimizing a wartime strategy that occasionally needs some Viagra of its own.
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