Many Thai workers, now out of poverty, are in dissent

Image by __maurice via Flickr

By Andrew Higgins
Wednesday, June 9, 2010; A10

NONBON, THAILAND -- San Silawat has three dogs, two cows and a parrot. He grows rice and spring onions on a small plot of land. But he's hardly a pauper: He's added a second floor to his house and built a blue-tiled patio. His son plays computer games in the front room. His daughter recently bought a Nissan pickup truck. His granddaughter studies nursing in Bangkok.

For all his relatively good fortune, however, San is certain about one thing: "Life is definitely getting worse," said the 62-year-old farmer, grumbling about the price of gasoline, school fees and a political and economic system he sees as rigged in favor of the rich.

Last month, San and six friends from this village in northeastern Thailand piled into a pickup and drove 14 hours to join "red shirt" protests in Bangkok. During nine weeks of demonstrations, scores of other rural folk from Nonbon and nearby settlements made the same 390-mile trip.

Beneficiaries of an economic boom that, in just three decades, has cut the proportion of Thais living below the poverty line from 42 percent to about 8 percent, San and his family represent both the promise and the peril of Asia's dizzying transformation.

From China in the north to Indonesia in the south, hundreds of millions of people are now living far better than a generation ago. But the gap that separates them from the rich has often grown wider. As their fortunes and expectations have risen, so too has their frustration. And, as recent turmoil in Thailand has shown, this can mean big trouble.

San and his neighbors rallied to the red shirts not because they are hungry, uninformed and desperate but because they are no longer any of those things. Though still very poor compared with Bangkok residents who cheered the red shirts' defeat when government troops moved in on May 19, they are a better-off, better-informed and far more demanding voice in national affairs than their elders. San buys and reads a newspaper every day.

"Farmers in the past didn't ask for anything. They just did their farming," said his daughter, Tasaneeporn Boran, standing next to her brand-new black Nissan, which she bought in February.

"We now know what is going on," she said. "We know what we want and don't want." What she doesn't want most of all is a "government that only looks after the rich, instead of ordinary people."

Continental divide

It is a demand that raises alarming questions not just for Thailand's Eton- and Oxford-educated prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, but for governments across Asia struggling to manage rising expectations amid growing, but unevenly spread, prosperity. Thailand's protests began in March not during a recession, but as the economy recorded first-quarter growth of 12 percent, its strongest performance in 15 years.

China, meanwhile, saw its economy surge by 11.9 percent -- and has since been hit by a wave of labor unrest, including a strike over wages at a Honda factory in Guangdong, one of the country's wealthiest regions. China's Communist Party has staked its future on a bet that economic growth will reinforce, not undermine, stability. But Thailand's experience shows how easily such calculations can come unstuck.

Instead of political calm, growth in Thailand has brought increased tension. When the country set off the 1997 Asian financial crisis and fell into a deep slump, political stability in Thailand actually increased and then plunged as the economy took off again, according to the Worldwide Governance Indicators, compiled by experts from the Brookings Institution and the World Bank.

Over the last four decades, Thailand's economy has grown an average of about 7 percent a year, and average real per-capita income has roughly tripled since the mid-1980s. But, according to a recent report on Thailand last year by the United Nations Development Program, the Southeast Asian nation is beset by "persistent inequality" that defies a widely accepted theory that the gap between rich and poor widens during an initial phase of development but then narrows.

Thailand's income inequality is roughly the same as that of much poorer nations such as Uganda and Cambodia and slightly worse than that of China and the United States, both highly unequal in terms of income distribution, according to data in the United Nations 2009 Human Development Report.

Despite the income gap, the people of Nonbon have unquestionably benefited from their country's rapid development. Tasaneeporn recalled growing up in the 1970s with no electricity, no running water and no paved roads. Only one family had a TV.

The main economic driver in the region at the time was the U.S. Air Force, which used a big airfield in the nearby city of Ubon Ratchathani to launch bombing runs over Vietnam and Cambodia. Now, a recently widened four-lane highway -- dotted with convenience stores and shopping centers -- connects Ubon Ratchathani, the regional capital, to farmland around Nonbon.

Tasaneeporn's brother recently got work in the city at a new luxury hotel. The job gives him a small, steady income -- and puts him in daily contact with people who have far more money.

'Voice of the People'

The most vocal red shirt supporters in these parts are not the destitute -- people like Sritta Sorsrisuk, a 71-year-old farmer who has seen two of his six children die. "I don't care about politics," he said, sitting in a tumbledown shelter next to his tiny plot of land. But others "talk about it all the time: red this, red that."

More keen on the red shirts is Usasorn Anarat, a neighbor of San's who traveled to Bangkok twice to join the protests. Thanks to her husband, who works in Qatar, and modest profits from a rice farm, Usasorn has a monthly income of about $1,000, far above the local average.

Like San, Tasaneeporn and nearly everyone in the villages around here, she's a huge fan of Thaksin Shinawatra, the self-exiled former prime minister who was ousted by the military in 2006 and is now wanted for "terrorism" under a Thai warrant. Thaksin, Usasorn said, "loves the country, won elections, and they chased him away."

Thaksin, a billionaire, regularly visited the Thai countryside and launched a raft of programs to help rural residents, including cheap health care, easy credit and handouts of about $30,000 to each village head. He even stopped off in the village next to Nonbon.

"Nobody had done that before," said Tasaneeporn. Her father managed to shake Thaksin's hand. He now has a picture of Thaksin pinned on his living room wall, along with photographs of Thailand's king.

After Thaksin and King Bhumibol Adulyadej, now 82 and hospitalized, the most popular person around here is Phichet Thabbudda, a rabble-rousing radio announcer known as "DJ Toy."

He founded and ran the "Voice of the People," a shoestring local radio station that won a big following with fiery denunciations of the government and the well-to-do. He also organized convoys of vehicles bound for Bangkok

Echoing the rhetoric of red shirt leaders in Bangkok, DJ Toy spoke of Thailand as a nation divided between hard-working but impoverished "serfs" and an oppressive, greedy "aristocracy." This played well in Nonbon and in other villages across northern Thailand. But Jamnong Jitnivat, a longtime local campaigner for farmers' rights, said it distorts reality. The real issue, he said, is a government bureaucracy out of touch with an increasingly well-informed and better-off population that now "demands much more than before."

When troops moved in to dislodge protesters in Bangkok on May 19, DJ Toy's radio station thundered against the crackdown and called on listeners to show their anger. Protesters burned down city hall in Ubon Ratchathani. The following day, police and soldiers arrested DJ Toy at his home, raided his studio and hauled away his antenna.

San, the rice farmer, said he misses his broadcasts but still keeps up with events by reading the newspaper and watching TV. "We all know what is happening," he said. "We know who is good and who is bad."

Related articles by Zemanta

• Thailand: Raising a Red Flag (time.com)
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• Joshua Kurlantzick: Thailand Falls Apart (lrb.co.uk)
• Roots of crisis in Thailand (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Thailand Presentation (slideshare.net)
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U.S. ambassador dissents on Afghan troop increase - washingtonpost.com

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Strongly worded cables urge a pause until Kabul government shifts course

By Greg Jaffe, Scott Wilson and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, November 11, 2009 6:11 PM

The U.S. ambassador in Kabul sent two classified cables to Washington in the last week expressing deep concerns about sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan until Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government demonstrates that it is willing to tackle the corruption and mismanagement that has fueled the Taliban's rise, said senior U.S. officials.

Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry's memos were sent in the days leading up to a critical meeting Wednesday between President Obama and his national security team to consider several options prepared by military planners for how to proceed in Afghanistan. The proposals, which mark the last stage of a months-long strategy review, all call for between 20,000 to 40,000 more troops and a far broader American involvement of the war.

The last-minute dissent by Eikenberry, who commanded U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2006 and 2007, has rankled his former colleagues in the Pentagon -- as well as Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, said defense officials. McChrystal has bluntly stated that without an increase of tens of thousands of troops in Afghanistan in the next year, the mission there "will likely result in failure."

Eikenberry retired from the military in April 2009 as a senior general in NATO and was sworn in as ambassador the next day. His position as a former commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan is likely to give added weight to his concerns. It will also likely fan growing doubts about U.S. prospects for Afghanistan among an increasingly pessimistic public.

Although Eikenberry's extensive military experience was one of the main reasons he was chosen by Obama for the top diplomatic job in Afghanistan, the former general had been reluctant as ambassador to weigh in on military issues. Some officials who favor an increase in troops said they were befuddled by last-minute nature of his strongly worded cables.

In his communications with Washington, Eikenberry has expressed deep reservations about Karzai's erratic behavior and Afghan government corruption, particularly in the senior ranks of the Karzai government, said U.S. officials familiar with the cables. Since Karzai was officially declared re-elected last week, U.S. diplomats have seen little sign that the Afghan president plans to address the problems of corruption they have raised repeatedly with him.

U.S. officials were particularly irritated by a interview this week in which a defiant Karzai said that the West has little interest in Afghanistan and that its troops are there only for their own reasons. "The West is not here primarily for the sake of Afghanistan," Karzai told PBS's The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. "It is here to fight terrorism. The United States and its allies came to Afghanistan after September 11. Afghanistan was troubled like hell before that, too. Nobody bothered about us."

Karzai expressed indifference when asked about the withdrawal of most of the hundreds of U.N. employees from Afghanistan following a bombing late last month in Kabul. The blast killed six foreign U.N. officials.

"They may or may not return," Karzai said of the departing U.N. employees. "I don't think Afghanistan will notice it."

In the cables, Eikenberry also expressed frustration with the relative paucity of money set aside for spending on development and reconstruction this year in Afghanistan, a country wrecked by three decades of war. Earlier this summer he asked for $2.5 billion in nonmilitary spending for 2010, a 60 percent increase over what Obama had requested from Congress. But the request has languished even as the administration has debated spending tens of billions of dollars on new troops.

The ambassador also has worried that sending tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops would increase the Afghan government's dependence on U.S. support at a time when its own security forces should be taking on more responsibility for fighting. Prior to serving as the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Eikenberry was in charge of the Afghan army training program.

Eikenberry's cables emerged as military planners presented Obama with several options for how to proceed in Afghanistan on Wednesday afternoon that at a minimum would send 20,000 additional U.S. troops. The proposals, marking the last stage of a months-long strategy review, all call for a broader American involvement in the war.

Obama received the options Wednesday afternoon in a Situation Room meeting with his national security team, and he will consider each on his nine-day trip to Asia that begins Thursday. Each strategy is accompanied by precise troop figures and the estimated annual costs of the additional deployments, which run into the tens of billions of dollars.

Facing a nation increasingly pessimistic about U.S. prospects in Afghanistan, Obama is considering a set of options that would all draw America deeper into the war at a time of economic hardship and rising fiscal concerns at home. His own party is largely opposed to expanding the war effort after eight years, and the extended review has revealed a philosophical division within his administration over how to proceed.

The internal deliberations have been shaped in large part by the hard skepticism of his civilian counselors, led by Vice President Biden, who have argued for a more narrow counterterrorism strategy that would not significantly expand the U.S. combat presence in Afghanistan.

But Obama's senior military advisers, supported by such influential Cabinet members as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, have said that only a "jump" in U.S. forces can turn back the Taliban and prevent Afghanistan from once again becoming a haven for al-Qaeda.

Obama has been seeking a middle ground, along with his national security adviser, James L. Jones, a four-star general described as skeptical that a large additional troop deployment would help stabilize the country. The review has already concluded that the Taliban cannot be eliminated as a military and political force, only weakened to the extent that it no longer poses a threat to the weak central government in Kabul.

The options range from a modest deployment of new troops combined with a focus on counterterrorism operations to a broader and probably longer-running counter-insurgency program. Whichever course he chooses, Obama will probably have to explain a recalibrated set of U.S. goals in Afghanistan and Pakistan nine months after he first articulated his administration's interests there.

Obama is taking into consideration the potential length of an additional American commitment, the effectiveness of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the preparedness of Afghanistan's security forces, according to officials familiar with the review. He is also considering the uncertain support of neighboring Pakistan, and his own conclusions about what is realistically achievable against a rising indigenous insurgency.

A senior administration official involved in the review, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the internal deliberations, said "the troop level is only a way of measuring each of these equities against each other."

"Do we have any assurances of what Pakistan will do?" asked the official, who is identified with the group of Obama advisers skeptical of the merits of a large additional troop deployment. "At least in Iraq, you had some functioning government there at the time of the surge. In Afghanistan, there is no government there."

Obama and his senior advisers are also considering the cost of an additional years-long troop deployment, which would require an expensive new base construction program in Afghanistan to accommodate extra personnel.

Administration officials say it costs approximately $1 billion a year to support 1,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, a country whose gross domestic product is roughly $900 million. The recently passed defense-spending bill already includes $120 billion for U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for the coming fiscal year, but any additional resources would have to be approved by Democratic congressional leaders who generally favor few, if any, additional combat troops.

"Everybody's sensitive to costs, for obvious reasons, because we don't have unlimited resources," said a second senior administration official briefed frequently on the internal deliberations. "But the idea is to get the strategy right, determine what's achievable, then select the resources needed. That will drive the cost decisions."

Obama asked for the troop options last month in a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Tuesday that he would receive four proposals.

But officials said it is unclear whether Pentagon planners will include an option that calls for an additional deployment of 10,000 to 15,000 troops, the lowest number originally under consideration. The proposal holds little merit for military planners because, after building bases to accommodate 10,000 or so additional soldiers and Marines, the marginal cost of adding troops beyond that figure would rise only slightly.

The most ambitious option Obama is set to receive Wednesday calls for 40,000 additional U.S. troops and mirrors the counterinsurgency strategy outlined by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, commander of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan, in his stark assessment of the war filed at the end of August.

Military planners put the additional annual cost of McChrystal's recommendation at $33 billion, although White House officials say the number is probably closer to $50 billion.

McChrystal called for significantly more U.S. troops to protect Afghan civilians in the country's 10 to 12 largest urban areas, and to take the fight to the Taliban quickly to turn back recent insurgency gains within the next 18 months. Under the best of circumstances, military planners and White House officials say, a deployment of that size would not be completed until 2011.

Although that plan was originally favored by senior military officials, a second option now appears to have Gates's backing and is said to be the Pentagon's preferred choice, according to military planners.

The strategy, referred to by military planners as the "Gates Option," would deploy an additional 30,000 to 35,000 U.S. troops to carry out McChrystal's strategy. It would also rely on the administration's NATO allies to make up the 5,000- to 10,000-troop difference between the U.S. deployment and McChrystal's requested force size.

Of the roughly 100,000 international forces in Afghanistan, 68,000 are American. Obama dispatched 21,000 additional troops in March, a deployment that is just now arriving in full.

Last month, NATO defense ministers endorsed McChrystal's strategy during a meeting in Slovakia, although they did not pledge any additional forces. The war, like the conflict in Iraq, is seen by much of the European public as an unpopular U.S. project.

According to Pentagon and White House officials, Gates will appeal for more troops from the governments of Britain and Canada, in particular. Canada's parliament has ordered the country's 2,800 soldiers in Afghanistan out by the end of 2011.

The Dutch government is also scheduled to pull its more than 2,000 troops from Afghanistan next year. White House officials point out that, if Canada and the Netherlands carry out the scheduled withdrawals, one additional U.S. combat brigade sent to Afghanistan would simply be replacing the allies' departing forces, resulting in no net gain on the ground.

Obama has reached out to European allies since taking office, emphasizing the alliances neglected for years by the Bush administration. European leaders have praised the diplomacy, and Gates believes it is time for them to show their support with tangible commitments.

But advisers say that Obama, while supportive of Gates's appeal in theory, is skeptical he can succeed given the depth of European opposition to the war. Military planners estimate that the Gates option would cost $27 billion a year.

The third option, known by military planners as "the hybrid," would send 20,000 additional U.S. troops to shore up security in the major population areas.

In the rest of the country, the military would adopt a counterterrorism strategy targeting al-Qaeda operatives, using Predator drones and other tactics that leave a light U.S. footprint on the ground. The military puts the annual cost at $22 billion.

Although McChrystal identifies between 10 to 12 population areas that need U.S. protection, White House officials say the number could be lower.

Obama asked for a province-by-province analysis of the country to determine where local leaders could be counted on to ensure security, information he is using in part to determine how long U.S. forces might have to remain in the country and at what level.

One senior administration official noted that roughly 68 percent of the Afghan population lives in Kabul, Kandahar, Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif, adding that "all of them have some need of protection."

"What do you have to protect to ensure that the Afghan government stays in power?" asked one senior administration official. "You need a level of control over the population that legitimately represents Afghanistan. Whether that's three or five or 10 cities is still part of the debate."

Politics and Prison in Venezuela - washingtonpost.com

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Student Protester's Saga Shines New Light on Chávez's Approach to Dissent

By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, October 5, 2009

CARACAS, Venezuela -- President Hugo Chávez's government says Julio Cesar Rivas is a violent militant intent on fomenting civil war.

Rivas's supporters say the 22-year-old university student is just one of many Venezuelans jailed for challenging a populist government that they contend is increasingly intolerant of dissent.

As the Chávez government approaches 11 years in power, many of its most prominent opponents are in exile in foreign countries or under criminal investigation here.

But human rights and legal policy groups say that even more worrisome is the growing number of government foes in jail for what they allege are politically motivated reasons. There are more than 40 political prisoners in Venezuela, and 2,000 Chávez opponents are under investigation, the groups and human rights lawyers say.

"The government tries to defend itself by saying it has politicians who are prisoners," said Teodoro Petkoff, a newspaper editor critical of Chávez. "But however you label them, they are people who are prisoners for political reasons."

Chávez administration officials contend that politics is not a motivating factor in the arrests and that the prisoners, political opponents or not, violated criminal code.

The arrests come in a year in which the number of anti-government protests has grown dramatically in Caracas, the capital, and other major cities. In the first eight months of this year, 2,079 demonstrations took place, up from 1,602 in 2008, according to a recent study by Provea, a human rights organization, and Public Space, a policy group that monitors free speech issues. Nearly 500 people were hurt and 440 were detained, the study said.

Venezuela's chief prosecutor, Luisa Ortega, warned at the end of August that such demonstrations were "in effect, criminal civil rebellion." She said protesters could be charged with crimes carrying prison terms of up to 24 years.

"People who disturb order and the peace to create instability of institutions, to destabilize the government or attack the democratic system, we are going to charge and try them," she told reporters.

Soon after that, Rivas learned how swift Venezuelan justice could be.

On Sept. 7, two weeks after participating in a demonstration, Rivas was arrested at his home. The main charge against him: inciting civil war.

"I didn't commit any crime. I am a young student who is not a coup plotter," he said in an interview. "I am not a CIA agent as they say I am."

Rivas's lawyers said the evidence against him was flimsy. A video made by a state television crew shows him shaking a police barricade during the protest and then telling a reporter that "we want to go to the Congress because we have a right." The tape was repeatedly shown on state television before Rivas was arrested, his lawyers said.

Rivas also became a target of Mario Silva, host of a state television show, "The Razor," in which Chávez foes are skewered. Silva aired photographs from Rivas's Facebook page and suggested that they demonstrated his culpability in generating unrest.

Among the photos was one of Rivas wearing a gas mask, which drew howls of laughter from Silva, and others of him with well-known opposition leaders. "Look, these are his friends!" Silva said. "This is in his Facebook. How horrible."

Alfredo Romero, who works at a Caracas law firm that represents Rivas and others detained by the government, said the steps taken against Rivas were meant to send a message to others in a budding student movement.

"The government is using Julio Rivas as an example to all the students: If you're a student and you go to a mass protest, you're going to go to prison," Romero said.

But Interior and Justice Minister Tareck El Aissami said Rivas's release Monday, after 22 days in jail, debunked "countless opposition lies" alleging government repression. "Like never before, we say that our government, particularly President Hugo Chávez, respects human rights," he told state media.

Though now free, Rivas still faces charges. But Tuesday, a day after his release, he joined 50 university students on a hunger strike to protest the jailings.

Government critics singled out for prosecution have little right of redress because the Chávez administration controls the Supreme Court and the lower courts, said Carlos Ayala, a Venezuelan constitutional and human rights lawyer who is president of the Andean Commission of Jurists.

"Venezuelan justice has been subservient to political intervention," Ayala said.

Calls to Ortega, the attorney general, were not returned. But Chávez has frequently characterized criticism of Venezuela's human rights credentials -- as well as accusations that he controls the courts -- as the fabrications of CIA-supported coup plotters.

Some of those who have been prosecuted, though, say the government shows little mercy.

Five years ago, three Caracas police commissioners were convicted on charges that they ordered the killings of pro-government protesters in 2002.

"The government needed to blame someone, but it did not look for who was really responsible," said Ivan Simonovis, one of the commissioners, who is serving a 30-year term.

The Due Process of Law Foundation, a Washington group that promotes judicial reform, last year concluded after a six-month study that Venezuela had violated the police officials' rights. The foundation also raised questions about the independence of the judges.

Simonovis said the only way out now is if the opposition wins a majority in Congress next year and names what he calls independent judges to the judiciary.

"For the moment," Simonovis said, "the president controls it all, and uses it like a weapon to make criminals of the opposition."

Peter W. Galbraith -- U.N. Isn't Addressing Fraud in Afghan Election - washingtonpost.com

By Peter W. Galbraith
Sunday, October 4, 2009

Before firing me last week from my post as his deputy special representative in Afghanistan, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon conveyed one last instruction: Do not talk to the press. In effect, I was being told to remain a team player after being thrown off the team. Nonetheless, I agreed.

As my differences with my boss, Norwegian diplomat Kai Eide, had already been well publicized (through no fault of either of us), I asked only that the statement announcing my dismissal reflect the real reasons. Alain LeRoy, the head of U.N. peacekeeping and my immediate superior in New York, proposed that the United Nations say I was being recalled over a "disagreement as to how the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) would respond to electoral fraud." Although this was not entirely accurate -- the dispute was really about whether the U.N. mission would respond to the massive electoral fraud -- I agreed.

Instead, the United Nations announced my recall as occurring "in the best interests of the mission," and U.N. press officials told reporters on background that my firing was necessitated by a "personality clash" with Eide, a friend of 15 years who had introduced me to my future wife.

I might have tolerated even this last act of dishonesty in a dispute dating back many months if the stakes were not so high. For weeks, Eide had been denying or playing down the fraud in Afghanistan's recent presidential election, telling me he was concerned that even discussing the fraud might inflame tensions in the country. But in my view, the fraud was a fact that the United Nations had to acknowledge or risk losing its credibility with the many Afghans who did not support President Hamid Karzai.

I also felt loyal to my U.N. colleagues who worked in a dangerous environment to help Afghans hold honest elections -- at least five of whom have now told me they are leaving jobs they love in disgust over the events leading to my firing.

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.

The election was a foreseeable train wreck. Unlike the United Nations-run elections in 2004, this balloting was managed by Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission (IEC). Despite its name, the commission is subservient to Karzai, who appointed its seven members. Even so, the international role was extensive. The United States and other Western nations paid the more than $300 million to hold the vote, and U.N. technical staff took the lead in organizing much of the process, including printing ballot papers, distributing election materials and designing safeguards against fraud.

Part of my job was to supervise all this U.N. support. In July, I learned that 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. Clearly, these polling centers would not open on Election Day. At a minimum, their existence on the books would create large-scale confusion, but I was more concerned about the risk of fraud.

Local commission staff members were hardly experienced election professionals; in many instances they were simply agents of the local power brokers, usually aligned with Karzai. If no independent observers or candidate representatives, let alone voters, could even visit the listed location of a polling center, these IEC staffers could easily stuff ballot boxes without ever taking them to the assigned location. Or they could simply report results without any votes being in the ballot boxes.

Along with ambassadors from the United States and key allies, I met with the Afghan ministers of defense and the interior as well as the commission's chief election officer. We urged them either to produce a credible plan to secure these polling centers (which the head of the Afghan army had told me was impossible) or to close them down. Not surprisingly, the ministers -- who served a president benefiting from the fraud -- complained that I had even raised the matter. Eide ordered me not to discuss the ghost polling centers any further. On Election Day, these sites produced hundreds of thousands of phony Karzai votes.

At other critical stages in the election process, I was similarly ordered not to pursue the issue of fraud. The U.N. mission set up a 24-hour election center during the voting and in the early stages of the counting. My staff collected evidence on hundreds of cases of fraud around the country and, more important, gathered information on turnout in key southern provinces where few voters showed up but large numbers of votes were being reported. Eide ordered us not to share this data with anyone, including the Electoral Complaints Commission, a U.N.-backed Afghan institution legally mandated to investigate fraud. Naturally, my colleagues wondered why they had taken the risks to collect this evidence if it was not to be used.

In early September, I got word that the IEC was about to abandon its published anti-fraud policies, allowing it to include enough fraudulent votes in the final tally to put Karzai over the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff. After I called the chief electoral officer to urge him to stick with the original guidelines, Karzai issued a formal protest accusing me of foreign interference. My boss sided with Karzai.

Afghanistan is deeply divided ethnically and geographically. Both Karzai and the Taliban are Pashtun, Afghanistan's dominant ethnic group, which makes up about 45 percent of the country's population. Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai's main challenger, is half Pashtun and half Tajik but is politically identified with the Tajiks, who dominate the north and are Afghanistan's second largest ethnic group. If the Tajiks believe that fraud denied their candidate the chance to compete in a second round, they may respond by simply not recognizing the authority of the central government. The north already has de facto autonomy; these elections could add an ethnic fault line to a conflict between the Taliban and the government that to date has largely been a civil war among Pashtuns.

Since my disagreements with Eide went public, Eide and his supporters have argued that the United Nations had no mandate to interfere in the Afghan electoral process. This is not technically correct. The U.N. Security Council directed the U.N. mission to support Afghanistan's electoral institutions in holding a "free, fair and transparent" vote, not a fraudulent one. And with so much at stake -- and with more than 100,000 U.S. and coalition troops deployed in the country -- the international community had an obvious interest in ensuring that Afghanistan's election did not make the situation worse.

President Obama needs a legitimate Afghan partner to make any new strategy for the country work. However, the extensive fraud that took place on Aug. 20 virtually guarantees that a government emerging from the tainted vote will not be credible with many Afghans.

As I write, Afghanistan's Electoral Complaints Commission is auditing 10 percent of the suspect polling boxes. If the audit shows this sample to be fraudulent, the commission will throw out some 3,000 suspect ballot boxes, which could lead to a runoff vote between Karzai and Abdullah. By itself, a runoff is no antidote for Afghanistan's electoral challenges. The widespread problems that allowed for fraud in the first round of voting must be addressed. In particular, all ghost polling stations should be removed from the books ("closed" is not the right word since they never opened), and the election staff that facilitated the fraud must be replaced.

Afghanistan's pro-Karzai election commission will not do this on its own. Fixing those problems will require resolve from the head of the U.N. mission in Afghanistan -- a quality that so far has been lacking.

galbraithvt@gmail.com

Peter W. Galbraith served as deputy special representative of the United Nations in Afghanistan from June until last week.

Foreign Policy In Focus | Afghanistan: What Are These People Thinking?

Cover of Vietnam: A History

Conn Hallinan | September 10, 2009

One of the oddest — indeed, surreal — encounters around the war in Afghanistan has to be a telephone call this past July 27. On one end of the line was historian Stanley Karnow, author of Vietnam: A History. On the other, State Department special envoy Richard Holbrooke and the U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal. The question: How can Washington avoid the kind of defeat it suffered in Southeast Asia 40 years ago?

Karnow did not divulge what he said to the two men, but he told Associated Press that the "lesson" of Vietnam "was that we shouldn't have been there," and that, while "Obama and everybody else seems to want to be in Afghanistan," he, Karnow, was opposed to the war.

It is hardly surprising that Washington should see parallels to the Vietnam debacle. The enemy is elusive enemy. The local population is neutral, if not hostile. And the governing regime is corrupt with virtually no support outside of the nation's capital.

But in many ways Afghanistan is worse than Vietnam. So, it is increasingly hard to fathom why a seemingly intelligent American administration seems determined to hitch itself to this disaster in the making. It is almost as if there is something about that hard-edged Central Asian country that deranges its occupiers.

Delusion #1

In his address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Obama characterized Afghanistan as "a war of necessity" against international terrorism. But the reality is that the Taliban is a polyglot collection of conflicting political currents whose goals are local, not universal jihad.

"The insurgency is far from monolithic," says Anand Gopal, a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor based in Afghanistan. "There are shadowy, kohl-eyed mullahs and head-bobbing religious students, of course, but there are also erudite university students, poor illiterate farmers, and veteran anti-Soviet commanders. The movement is a mélange of nationalists, Islamists, and bandits...made up of competing commanders and differing ideologies and strategies who nonetheless agree on one essential goal: kicking out the foreigners."

Taliban spokesman Yousef Ahmadi told Gopal, "We are fighting to free our country from foreign domination," adding, "Even the Americans once waged an insurgency to free their country."

Besides the Taliban, there are at least two other insurgent groups. Hizb-I-Islam is led by former U.S. ally Gulbuddin Hekmatyer. The Haqqani group, meanwhile, has close ties to al-Qaeda.

The White House's rationale of "international terrorism" parallels the Southeast Asian tragedy. The U.S. characterized Vietnam as part of an international Communist conspiracy, while the conflict was essentially a homegrown war of national liberation.

Delusion #2

One casualty of Vietnam was the doctrine of counterinsurgency, the theory that an asymmetrical war against guerrillas can be won by capturing the "hearts and minds" of the people. Of course "hearts and minds" was a pipe dream, obliterated by massive civilian casualties, the widespread use of defoliants, and the creation of "strategic hamlets" that had more in common with concentration camps than villages.

In Vietnam's aftermath, "counterinsurgency" fell out of favor, to be replaced by the "Powell Doctrine" of relying on massive firepower to win wars. With that strategy the United States crushed the Iraqi army in the first Gulf War. Even though the doctrine was downsized for the invasion of Iraq a decade later, it was still at the heart of the attack.

However, within weeks of taking Baghdad, U.S. soldiers were besieged by an insurgency that wasn't in the lesson plan. Ambushes and roadside bombs took a steady toll on U.S. and British troops, and aggressive countermeasures predictably turned the population against the occupation.

After four years of getting hammered by insurgents, the Pentagon rediscovered counterinsurgency, and its prophet was General David Petraeus, now commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East and Central Asia. "Hearts and minds" was dusted off, and the watchwords became "clear, hold, and build." Troops were to hang out with the locals, dig wells, construct schools, and measure success not by body counts of the enemy, but by the "security" of the civilian population.

This theory impelled the Obama administration to "surge" 21,000 troops into Afghanistan, and to consider adding another 20,000 in the near future. The idea is that a surge will reduce the violence, as a similar surge of 30,000 troops had done in Iraq.

Delusion #3

But as Patrick Cockburn of The Independent discovered, the surge didn't work in Iraq.

With the possible exception of Baghdad, it wasn't U.S. troops that reduced the violence in Iraq, but the decision by Sunni insurgents that they could no longer fight a two-front war against the Iraqi government and the United States. The ceasefire by Shi'ite cleric and Madhi Army leader Muqtada al-Sadr also helped calm things down. In any case, as recent events have demonstrated, the "peace" was largely illusory.

Not only is a similar "surge" in Afghanistan unlikely to be successful, the formula behind counterinsurgency doctrine predicts that the Obama administration is headed for a train wreck.

According to investigative journalist Jordan Michael Smith, the "U.S/ Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual" — co-authored by Petraeus — recommends "a minimum of 20 counterinsurgents per 1,000 residents. In Afghanistan, with its population estimated at 33 million, that would mean at least 660,000 troops." And this requires not just any soldiers, but soldiers trained in counterinsurgency doctrine.

The numbers don't add up.

The United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies currently have about 64,000 troops in Afghanistan, and that figure would rise to almost 100,000 when the present surge is completed. Some 68,000 of those will be American. There is also a possibility that Obama will add another 20,000, bringing the total to 120,000, larger than the Soviet Army that occupied Afghanistan. That's still only a fifth of what the counterinsurgency manual recommends.

Meanwhile, the American public is increasingly disillusioned with the war. According to a recent CNN poll, 57% of Americans oppose the war, a jump of 9% since May. Among Obama supporters the opposition is overwhelming: Nearly two-thirds of "committed" Democrats feel "strongly" the war is not worth fighting.

Delusion #4

Afghanistan isn't like Iraq because NATO is behind us. Way behind us.

The British — whose troops actually fight, as opposed to doing "reconstruction" like most of the other 16 NATO nations — have lost the home crowd. Polls show deep opposition to the war, a sentiment that is echoed all over Europe. Indeed, the German Defense Minister Franz-Joseph Jung has yet to use the word "war" in relation to Afghanistan.

That little piece of fiction went a-glimmering in June, when three Bundeswehr soldiers were killed near Kunduz in northern Afghanistan. Indeed, as U.S. Marines go on the offensive in the country's south, the Taliban are pulling up stakes and moving east and north to target the Germans. The tactic is as old as guerrilla warfare: "Where the enemy is strong, disperse. Where the enemy is weak, concentrate."

While Berlin's current ruling coalition of Social Democrats and conservatives quietly back the war, the Free Democrats — who are likely to join Chancellor Angela Merkel's government after the next election — are calling for bringing Germany's 4,500 troops home.

The opposition Left Party has long opposed the war, and that opposition gave it a boost in recent state elections.

The United States and NATO can't — or won't — supply the necessary troops, and the Afghan army is small, corrupt and incompetent. No matter how one adds up the numbers, the task is impossible. So why is the administration following an unsupportable course of action?

Why We Fight

There is that oil pipeline from the Caspian that no one wants to talk about. Strategic control of energy is certainly a major factor in Central Asia. Then, too, there is the fear that a defeat for NATO in its first "out of area" war might fatally damage the alliance.

But when all is said and done, there also seems to be is a certain studied derangement about the whole matter, a derangement that was on display July 12 when British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told parliament that the war was showing "signs of success."

British forces had just suffered 15 deaths in a little more than a week, eight of them in a 24-hour period. It has now lost more soldiers that it did in Iraq. This is Britain's fourth war in Afghanistan.

The Karzai government has stolen the election. The war has spilled over to help destabilize and impoverish nuclear-armed Pakistan. The American and European public is increasingly opposed to the war. July was the deadliest month ever for the United States, and the Obama administration is looking at a $9 trillion deficit.

What are these people thinking?

Conn Hallinan is a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus.

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