The wicked game (part one)

A few more cards on the table - as evident from this Times (London) account (headline: "White House seeks to explain its hesitations on Afghanistan") the Obama administration has come as close as it likely ever will to acknowledging the story behind the story of the Afghan troop numbers.

President Obama was said yesterday to be more concerned at "whether there's an Afghan partner" worth defending than with the politically fraught question of how many more troops to send, according to Rahm Emanuel, Mr Obama's chief of staff and a central figure in White House deliberations on Afghanistan.

The White House signaled Sunday that President Obama would postpone any decision on sending more troops to Afghanistan until the disputed election there had been settled and resulted in a government that could work with the United States.

Immediate concern: depending on interpretation, this: "Promoting a more capable, accountable, and effective government in Afghanistan", could cause some difficulties in the near term. Depending on execution it could cause long term problems, too.

That problematic interpretation isn't beyond the realm of possibility...

Afghanistan's UN-backed electoral panel invalidated an unspecified number of ballots in the Aug. 20 presidential election, a ruling that a U.S. monitoring group said may force incumbent Hamid Karzai into a runoff vote.

The Electoral Complaints Commission ordered the agency counting the vote, the Independent Election Commission, to adjust its official tally, the ECC said today on its Web site without giving details of the stricken ballots. Washington-based Democracy International said its analysis of ECC procedures shows that Karzai will get 48 percent of the revised vote, short of the 50 percent threshold he needs to avoid a runoff.

The BBC was confident enough in that prediction to headline their story Karzai 'stripped of outright win'. And "according to today's local paper," a milblogger in Afghanistan writes, "the number of votes cast for President Karzai has slipped to 47%."

Meanwhile, the full-court press is on. The AP:

NATO's 28 member states must quickly endorse U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal's recommendation to send reinforcements to deal with the escalating insurgency in Afghanistan because time is not on the alliance's side, its chief said Monday.

But Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said he doesn't expect NATO defense ministers to discuss such steps at their meeting this week in Bratislava, Slovakia. He said it "makes sense" to delay such decisions until the final results of Afghanistan's disputed presidential elections are known.

And VoA reports "Senior foreign officials have urged Mr. Karzai to accept the findings of a fraud investigation by a U.N.-backed panel that could decide whether the nation's disputed election goes to a runoff." Among those officials, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and U.S. Senator John Kerry. But more notable (if less noticed) was the participation of Bush administration U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan (and later Iraq) Zalmay Khalilzad.

Reuters:

Former U.S. ambassador to both Afghanistan and Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, returned from Kabul on Monday and said Karzai was willing to "power-share" and that differences with Abdullah appeared to be in the timing of such an agreement.

"The international community and the Obama administration appear to favor the unity government rather than an election," said Khalilzad. "But you could get a government which is weak and divided and it would not have strong legitimacy," cautioned Khalilzad, who met both Karzai and Abdullah during his trip.

Khalilzad recently criticized the Obama administration's dealings with Karzai,

...I believe that there was a mistake in terms of dealing with Karzai. Clear indications were given as least as Karzai saw it that the administration, some key members of the administration, did not like him and wanted to get rid of him and was encouraging others to run against him. And the meetings with him were quite contentious."

"At the same time the administration did not have a realistic plan about how to get another leader elected by the Afghan people. And so that in turn has been a factor in getting Karzai to hedge against the U.S. being administratively against him by assuring his prospects by making deals with others."

His return to the country of his birth (Khalilzad, like Karzai, is ethnic Pashtun) as a representative of the current administration* may signify a concession of failure thus far on their part to get Karzai to play ball, and/or an additional level of pressure brought to bear. (Khalilzad has also been mentioned as a possible member of the Afghan government - in May the New York Times reported he had considered running against Karzai for the presidency.)

As for a power sharing deal, according to Joe Klein that's exactly what the Obama administration wants from Karzai: "It seems clear--to me, at least--that the preferred U.S. outcome is no runoff election (which would be yet another security headache for U.S. troops in any case) and a coalition government in which Abdullah negotiates and achieves a significant portfolio." In fact, Klein sees Rahm Emanuel's statement last weekend as a message "...directed at Abdullah Abdullah, the former foreign minister who ran second in the election: make a deal with Karzai now."

From part two:

...the first strong indication that the Obama administration was going to enlist the aid of the U.S. military as pawns in a game of leverage over Karzai came not with the "leak" of General McChrystal's report, but with a slight change in timing of the due-date of the report a month prior:

The timing of Gen. McChrystal's primary assessment remains in flux. It was initially due in mid-August, but the commander was summoned to a secret meeting in Belgium last week with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and told to take more time. Military officials say the assessment will now be released sometime after the Aug. 20 vote.

Part two is here.

*Late update: according to this BBC report Zalmay Khalilzad "much to the annoyance of US officials, said he had come on a personal basis to help resolve this crisis."