National elections and Afghanistan: putting the cart before the horse?

Posted on November 8th, 2009 josh 3 comments  Print This Post

As a student of democratic governance and counterinsurgency, I am troubled by the emphasis of US democracy and governance assistance on holding national elections under conditions of extreme physical insecurity. I believe a fair reading of the work of counterinsurgent theorist and practitioner David Galula supports an emphasis on holding local elections, and that only after establishing certain levels of security. As one example, I believe the current structure of elections and governance in Afghanistan overemphasizes national elections and contemplates elections far in advance of setting the basic security conditions that are a prerequisite for success. To be sure, the goals of counterinsurgency and democracy promotion are different and can clash in their respective emphases on providing stability and legitimate governance versus creating institutions that provide legitimacy through political competition. That said, whatever common ground exists for the two disciplines should be built upon.

Why, however, should an observer of democratic transitions be concerned by counterinsurgency theory? The relationship between elections and counterinsurgency operations simply constitutes an extension of Thomas Carothers’s observation in Aiding Democracy Abroad that the United States has a history of engaging in democracy promotion in the same places that it fights wars. A brief glimpse at the Obama Administration’s fiscal year 2010 budget for democracy and governance programming reveals that just over 50% of the funds requested are devoted to regions of the world where the United States is either engaged in or supporting counterinsurgency operations: Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. Despite this funding support for governments engaged in life-or-death struggles to claim legitimacy and provide security and stability to their citizenry, the focus of the democracy promotion community on support for national elections in Afghanistan under current security conditions seems misplaced.

First, in his seminal work Counterinsurgency Warfare, noted counterinsurgency theorist and practitioner David Galula presents a program for pacification of a rebellious, insurgent-dominated area through destroying the insurgent’s political organization. Under Galula’s program, holding local elections should only occur once the counterinsurgent has effectively removed “the direct threat of the armed insurgents and the indirect threat of the political agents.” Clearly, this victory has yet to occur, even in the parts of Afghanistan in which ISAF is the most active. The use of “night letters” threatening violence to Afghans wno participate in elections and attacks on international election assistance personnel, to pick just two examples, illustrate that Galula’s conditions of stability have not yet been established. Under this theory, elections under these conditions are premature. Such elections will be easily disrupted by insurgents, and will have little ability to enable Galula’s objectives of providing legitimacy to the government and developing a crop of politically astute local leaders who can be groomed for national leadership positions. Even where national elections are primarily driven by concerns other than democracy promotion, such as the need to create interlocutors between the government and the foreign counterinsurgent forces, the value of the interlocutors thus created is questionable. Without obtaining local legitimacy and testing the suitability of leaders for higher office, the risk of engaging in a dangerous, expensive exercise to obtain incompetent interlocutors who cannot effectively fulfill their main interlocutory function due to their domestic unpopularity is too high.

Second, Galula emphasizes a gradual start to national government by beginning with elections for local governmental offices rather than elections for a national government. According to Galula, beginning with elections for “local provisional self-government” enables leaders to “emerge naturally from the population, which will feel more bound to them since they are the product of its choice.” This provides the crucial element of legitimacy to the counterinsurgent government and enables the early identification of competent local leaders, rather than the expedient but uncertain method of designating “men who have been previously identified as supporters, thus imposing them on the population.” One can find echoes of this local emphasis elsewhere in the counterinsurgency literature. In Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl notes the responsibility of counterinsurgent district political officers for “the inauguration and guidence [sic] of elected local councils, building a framework for popular government well in advance of an independent government in British Malaya.  More recently, in David Kilcullen’s widely praised book on counterinsurgency The Accidental Guerrilla, Kilcullen cites one Afghan tribal leader who questions a focus on national over local elections, and links the success of counterinsurgent efforts in Iraq to an emphasis on working with local tribal leaders, a “bottom-up structure outside the [top-down] one we have been working so hard to create.”

Criticisms of an emphasis on the local level include that overly strong local power structures would be naturally antagonistic to a central state, and that here elections would simply launder local strongmen to emerge as democratically elected candidates. Although these points are well taken, if the legitimacy and resources of the national government are so weak that they cannot attract village and tribal leaders, efforts to build a central state are futile in any event. Nor is this local focus foreign to the democracy promotion literature. As Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan note, early nation-states “developed a wide range of agencies of unification and standardization and gradually penetrated the bastions of ‘primordial’ local culture … the early growth of the national bureaucracy tended to produce essentially territorial oppositions”. These territorial oppositions may or may not cohere to balance one another in a national government; but strong local governments and interests do not prohibit the later formation of a strong national government. As for the “laundering” nature of democratic institutions, this may be true for initial local elections. However, there is evidence, particularly the work of Staffan Lindberg in African regimes, to suggest that the simple repetition of elections can drive increases in the level of democratic qualities in society, including the subsequent gradual elimination of members of a previous autocratic regime.

By contrast to Galula’s local emphasis, the lowest level of popularly elected leadership in Afghanistan is the provincial council level.  The crucial executive office of provincial governor is a position appointed by the President of Afghanistan.  The ability of the president to use these appointments as patronage positions has arguably led to the installation of corrupt, unaccountable executives who do not enjoy the support of the local population in their assigned provinces, and in any event have not emerged from the local population in the endogenous process Galula envisions.

Thus, according to Galula, the structural emphasis on national elections, reliance on cooperative leaders whose political origins stem from appointment by the counterinsurgent, and failure to grow competent, locally popular leaders who can eventually assume power constitutes a dangerous flaw. This observation that local, rather than national, political organizations offer the best way forward for counterinsurgent forces is bolstered by practical examples from the history of counterinsurgent warfare. Given the failure of the recent national elections in Afghanistan to restore anything like the hoped-for legitimacy to the Karzai government, perhaps it is time to refocus the tremendous amount of democracy assistance funding being channeled into Af-Pak on local governance, local elections, and growing a generation of Afghan leaders from the ground up, rather than the top down.