Understanding Afghanistan: A Guide

A running tally and background on the 2009 presidential election in Afghanistan, including vote tallies, reports of fraud and violence.

Resurgent since 2006, the Taliban controls vast swaths of the country and violence is endemic. More coalition troops have been killed in 2008 than in any other year since their presence in Afghanistan began in 2001, and the face has accelerated in 2009. The government of Hamid Karzai is corrupt and has little legitimacy among the people. Many members of the coalition are uneasy about an open-ended military commitment. Afghanistan’s future is uncertain.

Hamid Karzai has been president of Afghanistan since that country's liberation from Taliban rule in 2001. He started with promise as an intellectual with integrity and deep roots in Afghanistan's Pashtun culture. He's shrewd, charismatic and relatively honest. But he's been an ineffective president, reigning over what Hillary Clinton dubbed a "narco-state", doing little to temper the ruling elite's corruption, the religious elites' extremism, and the Taliban's resurgence. He's out of favor with the Obama administration. He's running for reelection in balloting set for Aug. 20, 2009--with surprising effectiveness.

The 2009 presidential and provincial elections on August 20, 2009, were to represent a step in Afghanistan's political development. But they did so in appearance only. Some 40 candidates filed to challenge incumbent Hamid Karzai, almost ensuring a runoff election. Election results were not expected to change the country's essential problems. Here's an analysis.

The Taliban—from the Arabic word for student, “taleb”—are fundamentalist Sunni Muslims, mostly from Afghanistan’s Pashtun tribes. The Taliban dominates large swaths of Afghanistan and a large part of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Here's a brief history of their origin and philosophy.

Immediately on taking over cities and communities in Afghanistan, the Taliban imposes its law, based on an interpretation of Sharia, or Islamic, law that was stricter than in any part of the Islamic world. The interpretation is at wide variance from that of most Islamic scholars.

Think of President Obama's new strategy regarding Pakistan and Afghanistan, announced March 27, 2009 in a long speech, as his foreign policy's AIG: Pakistan needs an economic and political bail-out to ensure against the Taliban's continuing march toward Peshawar and Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. Afghanistan need a military, political and economic bail-out to push back a Taliban that's taken over more than 70 percent of the country and ensure against the disintegration of Hamid Karzai's obscenely corrupt and ineffective government.

Troops, and casualties, have been surging through Afghanistan since 2008. The grim numbers that used to attach to casualty reports from Iraq from 2004 to 2008 are now attaching to monthly reports from Afghanistan. At least 75 American and coalition soldiers were killed there in July (39 of them American, 22 British), by far the highest single-month tally since the Afghan war began in October 2001. The closest single-month figure to that toll was in June 2008, when 46 coalition soldiers were killed.

There is little question that American and NATO forces are bombing civilians in Afghanistan, and causing almost as many civilian deaths as the Taliban. There is no question that mostly American planes have dropped more bombs on Afghanistan in 2008—800,000 pounds in the first seven months—than at any point since 2001. There is also no question that 2008 was the deadliest year since 2001 for civilians and Western forces in Afghanistan.

It is one of the most beloved and best-selling novels of the decade (the 2000s): set partly in the United States, partly in Afghanistan, it recounts the ordeal of a man looking to redeem his past while saving the future, as he rediscovers possibilities in both. "You can be good again" sums up the novel's appeal.

The State Department's annual report on human and religious rights has its own list of documented brutality, including, in its own words, "extrajudicial killings; torture; poor prison conditions; official impunity violence and societal discrimination against women; restrictions on religious conversions; abuses against minorities; sexual abuse of children; trafficking in persons; abuse of worker rights; and child labor." Is it any wonder the Taliban control 70 percent of Afghanistan?