Capital Games
A recent article by Larry Goodson in the Journal of Democracy, which is published by the National Endowment for Democracy, should cause Iraqis to fret about their occupiers. Goodson, a professor of Middle East studies at the US Army War College, was a consultant in 2002 to the Afghan loya jirga that chose Hamid Karzai as Afghanistan's president. In the piece, he recalls being "excited to see democracy (of a sort) in action" when he witnessed Afghans voting last May for members of the loya jirga, He even gave a short speech, "telling the soon-to-be voters that the whole world was watching Afghanistan, and that any of them who had a complaint could come to me, as a representative of the international community."

Now the optimist is a pessimist. "Afghanistan's transition," Goodson writes, "even to stability (much less democracy) is highly unlikely. What is worse, after a largely successful military campaign, the United States and the rest of the world may have only a limited window of opportunity within which to aid Afghanistan's transition. Moreover, they may be losing interest in doing so, which would almost certainly doom any chance that the country might have." The United States, he argues, failed to do what was necessary to achieve stability in the country--that is, it did not maintain a security presence throughout Afghanistan, nor did it mount a "swift and massive" reconstruction. It essentially blocked "any serious international peacekeeping" outside of Kabul, which has enabled warlordism to rise outside the capital city. "Total spending on peacekeeping operations in Afghanistan during the past year," Goodson notes, "was $540 million, or about 5.4 percent of the roughly $10 billion that it cost the US-led military coalition to operate there."