A path out of Afghanistan

If the prospects in Afghanistan were bleak before next Saturday's scheduled presidential run-off election, they are absolutely stark now that the election is off the table. Dr. Abdullah Abdullah's surprising withdrawal from the race -- a decision based on the reality that his bid for the presidency had no chance of success against the vote rigging of the corrupt Hamid Karzai regime -- simply confirms that. The larger reality now is that the vast improvement in governance that is needed to give Afghanistan a chance to build success on the back of the West's war against the Taliban is fading rapidly in the rear view mirror.

Regrettably, Dr. Abdullah's decision was rational. With President Karzai's handpicked election commission -- the same commission that merely winked at his staggering vote fraud in the first round -- still in place, Dr. Abdullah's withdrawal simply acknowledged reality: Nothing would change in the final election. Dr. Abdullah, a member of the Tajik ethnic minority, would lose again as Mr. Karzai's majority Pashtuns rolled over, again, for one of their own.

President Obama tried Monday to put the best face possible on the election disaster. He said tightly that the election had been "messy" but that Mr. Karzai had properly been awarded the presidency under the laws of Afghanistan. Then he tried diplomatically to jawbone some value out of the result.

After "some difficult years ... of drift," he said, American and NATO countries would now be watching to see if Mr. Karzai "is going to move boldly and forcefully forward and take advantage of the international community's interest in his country to initiate reforms internally. "That has to be one of our highest priorities," he said.

In fact, the Obama administration had staked its support for staying in Afghanistan on the hope that a new government would make all the right moves that Mr. Karzai has failed so abjectly to make in the past seven years. The likelihood of that seems more remote than ever.

The United States and its NATO allies have been waiting for Mr. Karzai to arrest several top figures in his cabinet and inner circle, including: His brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who is widely suspected of protecting Afghanistan's booming heroin trade, which helps finance the Taliban and supplies 90 percent of the world's heroin; Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, accused of ordering the slaughter thousands of Taliban prisoners in 2001; and Marshal Muhammad Qasim Fahim, a former defense minister also suspected of narcotics trafficking.

Western powers also have been waiting for Kabul's government to clean up its corrupt Army and police infrastructure, and to effectively partner in infrastructure, education and health care initiatives. After seven years, Afghans have practically given up on Kabul's corruption and inefficiency and have begun joining the Taliban to fight the occupying armies that prop it up.

As for a legitimate government, the election debacle guarantees there will be none. Just 30 percent of voters turned out in the first round, and Mr. Karzai's campaign allegedly claimed more than 1 million votes from 1,500 phantom polling stations -- stations listed on a map but that never conducted voting.

With the latest turn in the election saga, the Obama administration cannot credibly claim that it can improve the Karzai government, or effectively partner with it to enhance Washington's and NATO's chance of defeating the resurgent Taliban, which our own generals have said for months is now winning the war in Afghanistan.

Before the Obama administration follows with a decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, the White House must consider that injecting more troops will just further fuel the Taliban's guerrilla war and lure more recruits to its side. In any case, it is increasingly clear, as the British and Russians learned in earlier wars, that extremist Afghan guerrillas can hide forever in their mountainous wilderness and will never be controlled.

With President Karzai having blown up the chances for a legitimate government to take over, this may prove the best opportunity President Obama will have to escape a quagmire in Afghanistan. Counting on the Karzai regime is not a good bet.