Word: afghanistanism
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...visited Nepal last December to launch construction of a new highway connecting central Nepal to China, and soon after, China announced plans to extend a controversial railway to Tibet as far as the border with Nepal. India is countering: after Beijing agreed to develop a massive copper field in Afghanistan, New Delhi pledged more than $1 billion in development aid to Kabul. (Download a PDF map of India and China...
...staging elections in conflict zones. Such elections, though often held up (with the U.S. domestic political audience in mind) as examples of democracy's triumph, can actually undermine U.S. goals in those situations. Contrary to the Obama Administration's spin, resolving the dispute over the fraudulent ballots in Afghanistan's August election was never the key to determining whether to send more U.S. troops into the country. In fact, the runoff election was never going to strengthen the legitimacy of the resulting government; it was always more likely to further weaken it. (See pictures of the presidential election in Afghanistan...
...Elections typically only resolve a conflict when the major parties to that conflict have accepted the balloting and its ground rules as the basis for a solution. And that was no more the case in Afghanistan today than it was in the U.S. in 1864, when a presidential election was held during the Civil War. Nobody imagined that the electoral contest between President Abraham Lincoln and General George B. McClellan was the country's primary political battle; nor was the contest between Karzai and Abdullah the key conflict in Afghanistan. Instead, Afghanistan is in the grip of a civil...
...enforced by threat of death. But whether out of fear, political choice or sheer indifference, 12 million voters - representing 70% of the electorate, compared with just 30% in 2004 - stayed away from the ballot stations. A runoff election was expected to see an even smaller turnout. (See pictures of Afghanistan's mock election...
...become conventional wisdom even among the U.S. and its NATO allies that stability in Afghanistan will ultimately depend on a political settlement that somehow involves most of those currently fighting under the Taliban rubric. So just as the U.S. chose to avoid the very election it had forced Karzai to accept and turned instead to brokering a backroom deal that would dilute the incumbent's authority, any political solution in Afghanistan will have be negotiated on the basis of the real distribution of power, rather than votes cast in an election staged in the heat of a civil...