Where is Democracy in Afghanistan ?

The Afghan government’s limited writ and widespread official corruption are helping sustain a Taliban insurgency, and have fed pessimism about the Afghanistan stabilization effort. However, President Hamid Karzai has been able to confine ethnic disputes to political competition by engaging in compromises with major faction leaders, combined with occasional moves to weaken them. This strategy has enabled Karzai to focus on trying, with limited success to date, to win over members of his ethnic Pashtun community, some of which are tolerating Taliban insurgents. Karzai has faced substantial loss of public confidence, in large part due to widespread official corruption, but he is still considered a favorite for re-election on August 20, 2009. A major question is whether he wins more than 50% to avoid a second round run-off, and whether a run- off, if held, would increase the chances for his defeat. The United States is officially neutral in the contest, although Karzai has complained about U.S. official meetings with his challengers. Winning Pashtun support for the Afghan government is predicated, at least in part, on the success of efforts over the past few years to build local governing structures. New provincial councils will be elected on August 20 as well, although their roles in local governance and their relationships to appointed governors, remains unclear and inconsistent across Afghanistan. The trend toward promoting local governing bodies is to accelerate, according to the Obama Administration’s review of U.S. strategy, the results of which were announced on March 27, 2009. The core of the new strategy is a so-called “civilian surge” that is in the process of doubling, to about 900, the number of U.S. civilian personnel to deploy to Afghanistan to help build its governing and security institutions, particularly at local levels, and to increase economic development efforts.

the Administration is required to develop, by September 23, 2009, “metrics” by which to judge progress in Afghanistan, including the performance and legitimacy of the Afghan government and its efforts to curb official corruption. Small amounts of U.S. funds are tied to Afghanistan’s performance on such metrics. Despite the formal procedures of democracy established since the fall of the Taliban, many traditional patterns of authority remain. These patterns have been evident in the 2009 presidential campaign in Afghanistan, where many candidates, Karzai in particular, have forged campaign strategies designed to assemble blocs of ethnic and geographic votes, rather than promote specific new ideas. Some say that Afghanistan continues to be run mostly by local faction leaders who selectively apply, or in some cases ignore entirely, Afghan law and who undermine internationally-accepted standards of rule of law. Some believe that traditional Afghan patterns of decision making have some democratic and representative elements. This could be considered helpful to forging a modern democracy, although some might see these traditional patterns as competing mechanisms that resist change and modernization, and do not meet international standards of democratic governance. At them national level, the loya jirga, or traditional Afghan assembly consisting of about 1,000 delegates from all over Afghanistan, has been used to ratify some major decisions in the post-Taliban period (Karzai’s leadership, the post-Taliban constitution, and long term defense relations with the United States). At the local level, shuras, or jirgas (consultative councils) composed of local notables, are key mechanisms for making authoritative local decisions or dispensing justice.

Afghans turn often to these local mechanisms to adjudicate disputes rather than use the national court system. Some estimates say that 80% of cases are decided in the informal justice system.

So again we refer to first question where is Democracy?

Although democracy promotion, per se, was not a major feature of the Obama Administration March 27, 2009, strategy announcement, Afghanistan has taken significant formal steps toward democracy since the fall of the Taliban in November 2001. Karzai’s is the first fully elected government in Afghan history, although there were parliamentary elections during the reign of King Zahir Shah (the last were in 1969, before his reign was ended in a 1973 military coup). Presidential, parliamentary, and provincial elections, and adoption of a constitution were part of a post-Taliban transition roadmap established by a United Nations-sponsored agreement of major Afghan factions signed in Bonn, Germany on December 5, 2001, (“Bonn Agreement”),1 after theTaliban had fallen.

Although other ethnicities generally accept the right of the Pashtun community to hold the top position in Afghanistan, non-Pashtuns want to be included at high levels of the central government and to have a measure of control over how government programs are implemented in their geographic regions. Currently, of the major security ministries and organizations, only the National Directorate for Security (NDS, the Intelligence directorate) is still headed by a non- Pashtun (Amrollah Saleh, a Tajik). Attempting to maintain the fragile consensus among the various ethnicities, the other security ministries (Defense, Interior) tend to have non-Pashtuns in key deputy or subordinate positions. In the Defense Ministry, the chief of staff is a Tajik (Bismillah Khan), who reports to a Pashtun Defense Minister (Abdul Rahim Wardak). Afghanistan’s non-Pashtun communities have said that they will not rebel against their diminution in the upper levels of government, but would keep their competition peaceful. Some observers take a different view, asserting that Tajiks continue to control many of the command ranks of the Afghan military and security services, and that Pashtuns constitute merely an upper veneer of control of these organizations, causing Pashtun resentment.