Those who’ve followed Peter Galbraith’s career won’t be surprised by his pained, scathing and impassioned op-ed in the Washington Post indicting the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan — which fired him last week — for effectively siding with Hamid Karzai in the theft of the Afghan presidential election. This is a guy who snuck into Iraq to document Saddam Hussein’s genocide of the Kurds against the wishes of his bosses on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (fun fact: Galbraith’s ally and deputy at the time was Chris Van Hollen) and tried to force the Reagan administration to cut off arms sales; and who, as ambassador to Croatia, secretly helped break the arms embargo to Bosnia that ensured the vulnerability of Bosnian Muslims for the Serb onslaught. Assessments like this are simply par for the course:

The fraud has handed the Taliban its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United States and its Afghan partners. 

So the Taliban win the election by default, with U.N. complicity.  Nice little parting fuck-you-too there, huh?

Outside the realm of biography, two points remain. First, to play devil’s advocate for a moment, it’s actually unclear from Galbraith’s piece whether that assessment is true. The greatest danger he identifies is that the election results in a Tajik refusal to support the government, and since the Tajiks are rather unlikely to make common cause with the Taliban they’ve been fighting for over ten years, it’s a bit puzzling. I suppose I’m overthinking this, as the general taint of illegitimacy of the election is assured to have widespread consequences, most of which benefit the Taliban, even if not all of the benefits are direct ones. But it’s still worth putting a bit of stress on the idea.

Second, and relatedly, check out Dave Kilcullen’s prescription for Afghanistan in the New York Times:

COUNTERINSURGENCY is only as good as the government it supports. NATO could do everything right — it isn’t — but will still fail unless Afghans trust their government. Without essential reform, merely making the government more efficient or extending its reach will just make things worse.

Only a legitimately elected Afghan president can enact reforms, so at the very least we need to see a genuine run-off election or an emergency national council, called a loya jirga, before winter. Once a legitimate president emerges, we need to see immediate action from him on a publicly announced reform program, developed in consultation with Afghan society and enforced by international monitors.

I endorse the diagnosis and I see no reason to reject the prescription. But the constituency for what Dave proposes is… where? There needs to be a genuine Afghan appetite for a constitutional deviation out of this crisis, otherwise the result will perpetuate the illegitimacy that the election exposed. (I say "exposed" and not "created" because the act of stealing an election is merely a symptom — albeit a dire one — of a broader disease consuming the thief.) The international community cannot force this solution on Afghanistan, and Galbraith’s experience calls into question whether it would support such a solution even if an Afghan constituency for it materialized.

I want to find a pony, too, but we may be left with Kilcullen’s conclusion:

If we see no genuine progress on such steps toward government responsibility, the United States should “Afghanize,” draw down troops and prepare to mitigate the inevitable humanitarian disaster that will come when the Kabul government falls to the Taliban — which, in the absence of reform, it eventually and deservedly will.

Galbraith and Kilcullen would make great drinking buddies.