The Foreign Service Journal, December 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2014 37 U.S. made possible an unconditional comeback by those war- lords and commanders who had allied with them in their ght against the Taliban. Without any accountability for war crimes and massive human rights violations, they were integrated into the new political system.” e resulting combination of formal and informal power, wielded at the national and subnational levels, ended up delegitimizing the formal power structures. is, in turn, made the Taliban an increasingly attractive alternative. For a local leader who ended up on the wrong side of a dispute because his rival used his formal position to prevail, the Taliban o ered a means of resistance or revenge, regardless of how one felt about sharia. reatened from within and from without, the modernization project faced long odds. The 2014 Political Transition e bruising 2014 presidential election—particularly the manner of its resolution—was perhaps the nal decisive act in the struggle for modernity and order. ere was a genuine democratic activism in the lead-up to the election, in particu- lar among Afghanistan’s massive youth bulge (according to the United Nations Development Program, 68 percent of the nation’s population is under the age of 25). ere was also a signi cant amount of fraud, which political elites both perpe- trated and used to delegitimize the process. Unhappy backers of the losing candidate, Abdullah Abdul- lah, threatened to use their informal power against the state. is forced the Obama administration to intervene directly to broker a compromise. As happened earlier, this intervention again privi- leged accommodation for stability over the logic of modernization. Afterward, Ambassador James Dobbins, a former special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, ruefully noted: “Democracy is not sufficiently developed [in Kabul] to the point where a winner-take-all system, in which the losers retire and organize for the next election but don’t share any power following their loss, is really a workable solution.” After months of negotiations between the two camps and an unprecedented audit of every ballot box, a power-sharing government nally took o ce in September. But by acqui- escing to runner-up Abdullah’s request not to release the results of the o cial audit—which showed he had decisively lost—Washington not only locked traditional leaders into the institutions of governance, but institutionalized their rivalries. e Taliban, meanwhile, took advantage of Kabul’s power vacuum during the dangerous summer of the election to launch a series of debilitating attacks, taking on Afghan forces