It is clear that the recent Afghanistan election was marred by rampant fraud. The entire purpose of having an election in Afghanistan was to reestablish the government's legitimacy in advance of a renewed counter-insurgency campaign. Instead, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, aware that his support was dwindling, stuffed ballot boxes in order to guarantee victory.  Instead of renewing the current regime's legitimacy, he undercut it further.  Thus, for American interests, the election was a complete failure.

In many ways, this is symptomatic of a larger problem.  It is ridiculous to have a national election where the central authority only has control over the northern section of the country.  The rest of Afghanistan is controlled by the a mixture of the Taliban and assorted warlords (with no clear line separating these two "groups").  In such a situation, what else can a leader do but cut deals with local warlords?  Without functioning tools of government, Karzai has to rely on the most base institution: patronage. And it is a short and easy descent from buying warlords to stuffing ballot boxes (if it is a descent at all).

Titu Maiorescu, the brilliant Romanian statesman and literary critic, described a similar situation in his home country at the turn of the 20th century. 

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Romania's population at the time was mostly illiterate peasantry. But the small elite Francophone class in Bucharest wanted to modernize the country on Western lines.  To do so, it began copying all of the trappings of modern government-- systems that evolved in Britain and France over centuries. This included a liberal constitution, modern political parties, modern schools, and modern cultural institutions.

Maiorescu slammed these reforms. He argued that elite simply imported cultural and political forms from the West and placed them on top of the ancestral customs of the masses.  These new institutions, while congruent with norms in France and Britain, did not correspond to the prevailing local conditions in Romania.  

Instead, according to Maiorescu, the situation in Romania made a mockery of constitutional government. The Romanian government was "still-born" because it represented a bourgeoisie class that did not yet exist. Elites created a socialist party before there was a Romanian proletariat.  The Romanian government created schools in the villages but had no teachers to administer modern courses, and created national theaters before having any real Romanian playwrights.  In appearance, Romania was a modern country, but in reality, all its modern institutions were "forms without substance." 

In Afghanistan, we are the elite anglophone class.  In Kabul, we have created a form of modern government with little substance. The recent election reveals what the country is: a polity held together only by patronage, diffused through Hamid Karzai to local warlords, and underwritten by America and NATO.


- Jon