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Summary

The central governments limited writ and widespread official corruption are helping sustain a Taliban insurgency, and have fed pessimism about the Afghanistan stabilization effort. However, President Hamid Karzai has been able to confine ethnic disputes largely to political debate and competition by engaging in some non-democratic compromises with major faction leaders, combined with occasional moves to weaken them. This strategy has enabled Karzai to focus on trying, with only mixed success to date, to win over remaining members of his Pashtun community, some of which have begun to lean toward or tolerate Taliban insurgents. Karzai has faced substantial loss of public confidence, in large part due to widespread official corruption, but his opponentsdivided by ethnicity and personal ambitionwere unable to form a strong electoral coalition, and Karzai is considered a favorite for re-election on August 20, 2009. Winning Pashtun support for the Afghan government is predicated, at least in part, on the success of efforts over the past few years to build local governing structures. New provincial councils will be elected on August 20 as well, although their roles in local governance and their relationships to appointed governors, remains unclear and inconsistent across Afghanistan The trend toward promoting local governing bodies is to accelerate, according to the Obama Administrations review of U.S. strategy, the results of which were announced on March 27, 2009. The core of the new strategy is a so-called civilian surge that will virtually double, to about 900, the number of U.S. civilian personnel to deploy to Afghanistan to help build its governing and security institutions, particularly at local levels, and to increase economic development efforts. Under an FY2009 supplemental appropriation (P.L. 111-32), the Administration is required to develop metrics by which to judge progress in Afghanistan, including the performance and legitimacy of the Afghan government and its efforts to curb official corruption. Small amounts of U.S. funds are tied to Afghanistans performance on such metrics. The Administration review did not emphasize building democracy in Afghanistan, although that goal appears implicit within its recommendations. For further information, see CRS Report RL30588, Afghanistan: Post-Taliban Governance, Security, and U.S. Policy, by Kenneth Katzman.

Related Reports:
• RS21922

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