The Wrongologist

A ton of issues confront America’s foreign policy these days, and it seems that the success of the Obama-Kerry team worsens by the week:
• We back the Ukrainian government in a shooting war with its own citizens
• We can’t get on the same page with Europe regarding Russian sanctions
• Kerry couldn’t get a ceasefire deal in Israel for the current crisis
• Iraq shows that our huge expense on military and police training was a sham. We are now backing a failed state
• Kerry is trying (along with the 5 permanent members of the Security Council + Germany) to close a nuclear deal with Iran by July 20th – yet talk has moved on to debating the length of an extension to the deadline, not just the substance of the deal
• Kerry moved to defuse the electoral crisis in Afghanistan , but his effort had little effect

We could add to this list Syria, Egypt, Libya and China. Oh, and our little spying problem with Germany, or our little banking problem with France.

It is tempting to say President Obama and his Secretary of State are accident-prone, given to stumbles on the international stage. There may be some truth to that. We can say they inherited a set of policies with enough inertia that no single administration could completely alter the outcomes.

That’s all true, but we cannot point to a situation where things have gotten better.

Let’s focus on Afghanistan. Jim White at Emptywheel on Mr. Kerry’s trip to resolve the Afghan electoral crisis:

Three short weeks from tomorrow marks the date on which Afghanistan’s new president is to be sworn in. The problem, though, is that Abdullah Abdullah refuses to believe that he could have beaten Ashraf Ghani by a million votes in the first round and then lost to him by a million votes in the runoff a few weeks later

Kerry did not solve the crisis, but he did lay hands on the next ruler. Pictures can say much more than the words. Check out this photo of Kerry with the two candidates.

Reuters carried these photos of Ghani and Abdullah with Kerry In their story on Kerry’s visit to Kabul. Standing in front of the same backdrop of US and Afghan flags, the photo of Ghani and Kerry could pass as a propaganda photo with Ghani at his inaugural as the new president.

The photo with Abdullah, on the other hand, shows an uncomfortable Abdullah in a sideways glance at Kerry, who seems uninterested in shaking hands, as he did with Ghani.

Perhaps Abdullah and Kerry did shake hands, but Reuters selected a photo that seems to capture the essence of the current political crisis.

Kerry and the UN proposed a special audit of suspected fraudulent votes. Outgoing President Hamid Karzai is backing the proposal, which involves an audit of votes from 8,000 polling stations, or about 43% of the 8.1 million ballots cast. From the New York Times:

…within minutes, Mr. Abdullah’s campaign said it had already made clear to UN officials that the plan was not acceptable…A senior aide to Mr. Abdullah said the campaign had its own plan, which would entail audits of votes from about 11,000 of the roughly 22,000 polling stations

So, two plans. What could go wrong? More from Jim White:

The huge problem that Afghanistan faces is that there is no real way to audit this election after the fact… outside of Kabul, Afghan society is structured around village life and women often live their entire lives without going outside the walls of the family compound. Village elders carry huge influence for all residents of the village…

White quotes Anand Gopal, from his book, No Good Men Among the Living, pg. 261, on the 2009 election:

The goal was to ensure that women cast ballots, or, even better, that their husbands did so on their behalf. The men…performed the valuable work of liaising with the village elders and maleks, for whom a vote was not an exercise of democracy but a down payment on access, an effort to ensure that the right people were in power when the time came to call in a favor

So votes typically came in blocks, and apparently, it isn’t unusual for a village to report 90% support for a single candidate. Just how could the UN go about auditing these ballot boxes?

All of our money and all of our young peoples’ lives lost, for dueling ballot box-stuffing, with each side claiming the other is at fault, while vaguely threatening some kind of military force.

Kerry is smiling at the guy who is a member of the majority ethnic group and has the backing of Karzai. And of course, Kerry won’t look at the guy who doesn’t want to do what Kerry did in 2004 – go away quietly.

Apparently, from the perspective of the conventional American viewpoint, Ghani is the “legitimate” winner with a million-vote lead. Backing Ghani offers the Administration and the Pentagon an option to delay US withdrawal from Afghanistan to assure a peaceful transition.

Regardless of Mr. Obama’s true intentions, it appears corporate contractors and military suppliers will get another feed at the trough.

Go Team Kerry!