Will Abdullah's Withdrawal Affect the Administration's Ultimate Strategic Decision?

Afghan officials declared Hamid Karzai the winner of the Afghan elections after his opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, withdrew from the Nov. 7 runoff saying the Independent Election Commission was biased toward Karzai and that fair elections were impossible. At one point, the head of the IEC, Azizullah Lodin, reportedly smiled as he declared that “Karzai is going to win.”

A win for Karzai would have been the likely outcome. But with counterinsurgency, the means are as important as the ends -- and in this case, a runoff election was important to ensuring that, even if Karzai were re-elected, his government would have some veneer of legitimacy. Peter Galbraith, former deputy special representative of the United Nations in Afghanistan, called the original fraud-riddled election the Taliban's "greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United States and its Afghan partners." Today, Galbraith tells Spencer Ackerman that Abdullah "did the right thing" because "[t]he run off was certain to be more fraudulent than the Aug 20 vote with more ghost poling [sic] centers and the same corrupt officials in charge."

How will this affect the administration's ultimate strategic decision about whether or not to do counterinsurgency in Afghanistan? I'm not sure that it will. The Obama administration seems to be drifting toward a strategy that emphasizes local and provincial authority over that of the central government. The counterinsurgency manual is pretty clear about how vital a legitimate government is to the process -- but then again, John Nagl literally helped write the book on counterinsurgency, and as Spencer noted, it looks like the administration is taking his and Richard Fontaine's recommendations about how to wage a successful COIN campaign by focusing on "helping the Afghan government work at the local level" into account. I'd also be surprised if the administration didn't see something like this coming anyway.

--A. Serwer