New poll is an opportunity for Karzai, and the Taliban

That awkward axiom of counter-insurgency warfare lies behind the bitter wrangling over Afghanistan's presidential election, which culminated in Tuesday's announcement of a second round. Hamid Karzai, sombre, downbeat and apparently chastened, publicly accepted the verdict of the Electoral Complaints Commission.

This United Nations body chided him for the widespread ballot-rigging that marred the first round and knocked his share of the vote below the 50 per cent threshold needed for outright victory. So the contest will continue, with Karzai facing his leading opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, in a head-to-head vote on November 7.

Both British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and US President Barack Obama were quick to endorse this outcome and praise Karzai for accepting that he has not yet secured another term. The thinking of the American and British governments is clear: a discredited Afghan leader would be incapable of defeating the Taliban, even with the presence of about 100,000 Western soldiers in the country.

Ballot-stuffing, fraud and the exceptionally low turnout in the southern and eastern provinces most affected by the insurgency have all combined to tarnish the first round — and rob Karzai of any legitimacy. A second round provides a second chance to get this right. Or so the theory goes. In a two-horse race between Karzai and Abdullah, experience suggests that the president should emerge as the clear winner. He, after all, is a Pashtun and they are the largest single ethnic group among Afghanistan's 30 million people.

Abdullah also has Pashtun blood on his father's side, but he is considered to be a Tajik and they comprise about a quarter of the population. In a country where people vote according to ethnic loyalty, the numbers should be on Karzai's side. The optimists, notably John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, believe that the president can re-establish his legitimacy by winning a clean and credible second round, free of the chicanery that marred the first ballot.

Kerry, who appears to have been mediating between Karzai and the American administration, declared that a "time of enormous uncertainty has been transformed into a time of great opportunity". After his expected victory on November 7, America may urge the president to form a government of national unity and find a place in the Cabinet for Abdullah.

Karzai could then claim to be Afghanistan's legitimate leader on two grounds: he will have won a credible victory in a clean second round — never mind the fiasco of the first ballot — and he would preside over a unity government. He would then possess the broadest base of political support from which to take on the Taliban. That is the optimistic scenario.

But the chances of real life working out as smoothly as this are slim indeed. The first problem with this rosy forecast is that it wholly ignores the Taliban. If the British and the Americans know that a legitimate Afghan government is in their interests, the Taliban are equally well aware that undermining the election and preventing the birth of such an administration must be their strategic priority.

Just as Karzai and his foreign supporters have a second chance to get the election right, so the Taliban now have a second opportunity to sabotage the whole affair. If they can turn the new ballot into a fiasco, then nothing will be solved. The Taliban may even be able to engineer an utterly perverse result. If they are able to intimidate people in their Pashtun heartland to boycott the poll, they could deprive Karzai of the votes of his ethnic kith and kin.

The Taliban's central aim will be to drive down turnout, thereby robbing the whole contest of legitimacy and, perhaps, going as far as to deny the president his expected victory. What would happen then? Would Abdullah be proclaimed as Afghanistan's new president? If the central problem of Afghan politics is the alienation of the Pashtuns, the advent of a Tajik leader would only make this worse. And would Karzai leave office quietly? Peaceful transfers of power are unknown in Afghanistan's modern history.

In fact, of the 10 men who served as president in the past three decades, four were murdered — one was strung up from a lamppost and hacked to death. The worst fate that can befall a British politician is to be dispatched to the House of Lords. In Afghanistan, the personal consequences of political failure can be very grim indeed. Hence Karzai's desperate struggle to win re-election in the first ballot and his grim determination, persisting until Monday, to avoid a second round. So the next round of voting presents crucial opportunities to both sides: the West may finally get a reasonably legitimate Afghan ally, while the Taliban now has another chance to cripple the country's political leadership. Whoever makes best use of this chance will decide the future course of the Afghan story.

— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2009