The BBC reports: Heavy US losses in Afghan battle
Eight American soldiers and two Afghan troops have been killed in the deadliest attack on coalition troops for more than a year, officials say.
[…]
It was the worst loss coalition troops have suffered since August 2008, when 10 French troops were killed in an ambush in Kabul province.
A Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said the movement was behind the attack.
Beyond the deaths,
According to AP news agency, Mr Mujahid also said some 35 Afghan police officers had been taken into Taliban custody, and their fate would be decided by a council.
Provincial governor Jamaluddin Badar confirmed that some officials including a local police chief had been captured.
This is the backdrop for a column today in WaPo from Peter W. Galbraith who “served as deputy special representative of the United Nations in Afghanistan from June until last week”: What I Saw at the Afghan Election, which feeds the concern over the state-building side of the equation:
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.
As Galbraith notes, this was quite predictable and is classic election-related corruption in developing states, i.e., a lack of independence within electoral institutions:
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.
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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.
The whole column is worth a read. At a minimum it demonstrates serious governance problems to go along with a set of already known issues with the Afghan state (such as it is).
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