It’s the classic tight spot between the devil and the deep blue sea. Afghans are caught between having a corrupt and election-cheating Karzai as president and a historical scenario dominated by the likes of Mullah Omar, languishing in a civil war, or the Soviet regime. By Afghan standards, these are better times in Afghanistan. In fact, given the history of their country and the more desperate times they have known, another term under Hamid Karzai does not seem so bad. Karzai may just be what ‘Afghans can reasonably expect.’

If warlord-backed and corrupt Karzai is a bad option, compare it with what used to be.

Karzai’s immediate predecessor, Mullah Mohammed Omar, allowed Afghanistan to be a safe haven for the al-Qaeda. Under Omar’s medieval rule, Afghanistan became a ‘byword for Islamist barbarism.’

‘Four years of unrestrained civil war saw nearly all of Kabul blasted to ruin.’

The ‘Soviet-backed governments of Mohammad Najibullah and Babrak Karmal applied the usual Communist methods of rounding up, torturing and killing tens of thousands of real, suspected or imaginary political opponents.’

In 1973, Mohammed Daoud Khan ‘overthrew the Afghan monarchy in favor of a repressive, but also incompetent, one-party system.’

Though ‘essentially decent, civilized and well-meaning,’ Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan, was ‘politically weak and allegedly somewhat corrupt.’

In the face of all these far more desperate political scenarios in Afghanistan’s history, it is no wonder that ‘the announcement of Mr. Karzai’s re-election was greeted in Kabul with “a collective sigh of relief.”

Fact is Afghanistan, a tribally factionalized society, is better governed by a Pashtun such as Karzai ‘since Pashtuns are half the Afghan population and most of the trouble.’ Not to mention that Karzai is neither a despot nor a fanatic. He is painfully a democratic animal.

Also, under Karzai, girls went back to school, the economy bobbed its head above water, and people got access to health care.

Via The Wall Street Journal