• Michael Semple on BBC’s “Taking a Stand”
• The World: Our interview with Semple in October, 2009

• BBC coverage
• Afghan election

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JEB SHARP: I’m Jeb Sharp and this is The World.  President Obama called to congratulate Hamid Karzai today on his re-election.  The White House said it recognized Karzai as the legitimate president of Afghanistan, despite a fraud-riddled election that dragged on for months.  It finally ended this weekend when Karzai’s main rival, Abdullah Abdullah, bowed out of the scheduled runoff.  The World’s Matthew Bell begins our coverage.

MATTHEW BELL:  President Obama said he got on the phone with Hamid Karzai today to tell the Afghan leader that he’s drifted off course on some key priorities, and it’s time for a change.  It seemed like a diplomatic way of Mr. Obama saying he wants the Afghan president to get his act together.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: This has to be a point in time in which we begin to write a new chapter, based on improved governance, a much more serious effort to eradicate corruption, joint efforts to accelerate the training of Afghan security forces, so that the Afghan people can provide for their own security.

BELL: Administration officials have said President Obama’s decision on US troop levels for Afghanistan depends in part on whether there’s a credible Afghan government in place.  The White House said today that the President will make his decision on troops in the coming weeks.   Alex Thier of the US Institute of Peace says there’s some good news here for Washington, and that is, the flawed election process is finally over.

ALEX THIER: We will now move on from the turmoil of the last two months and move forward with the very important work that we have to do together with the Afghan government.

BELL:  Thier says the challenge for the US is to pressure Karzai’s government to be accountable.

THIER: What is most important to the Afghan people is results from the cooperation between the United States and the Afghan government.  What they will look to now is whether the Afghan government is going to perform, is going to live up to some of the promises that they and the international community together has been making for these last long eight years.

BELL: During that time, the international community has thought of its mission in Afghanistan as one of rebuilding democratic institutions.  But the election has changed that perception, says Michael Semple of Harvard University. Semple spent more than 20 years working on development projects in Afghanistan.

MICHAEL SEMPLE:  I don’t think that the international community is going to let go of Afghanistan.  I don’t think it’s going to stop supporting Afghanistan or stop supporting President Karzai.  But that support will be on different terms.  Now it is about propping up a friendly regime and avoiding it being toppled militarily by unfriendly forces. Now, that’s a totally different agenda which will be pursued in different means.

BELL: Semple says the international community is already lowering its expectations dramatically.

SEMPLE: The prospect of the Afghan government changing the way it does business in any radical sense, after eight years, seem to be frankly zero.

BELL: Others are holding out more hope for President Karzai.

TOM GOUTTIERRE: We may be just be able to put this all together.

BELL: Tom Gouttierre is an expert on Afghanistan at the University of Nebraska.  He says the message from President Obama to President Karzai right now should be, “Congratulations. Let’s get to work.”

GOUTTIERRE:  What else can we do?  We’ve got a lot invested. We’ve made a lot of promises which we have not yet met. You know, it’s now time for us to kind of gird up our loins, as they say, and get to work and do it correctly.  We have not been doing it correctly over the last eight years.  We had very poor leadership.  It was like the Keystone Kops.  Every year we’re coming in with another kind of policy, because there was never a real commitment.

BELL: Gouttierre concedes that the election was far from perfect and that Karzai’s government is corrupt, but he says most Afghans knew that Karzai would probably be re-elected in the end, and now is the time for the US and its Afghan partners to move on. Of course, the other side in the debate in Washington will point to the deeply flawed Afghan election and make precisely the opposite argument.  They will say the election proves the US lacks a credible Afghan partner, and that now’s the time to start cutting losses and looking for a way out.   For The World, I’m Matthew Bell.

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