There is something oddly conspicuous about elections during wartime. There’s the obvious difficulty, ensuring voter safety; and whether the ruling party will be able to ensure smooth governance after the conflict ends or whether the elections themselves can aid in state-building, curtailing the length of the conflict itself.

Look cursorily at the polls just a month ago and Karzai’s victory would have seemed inevitable. He enjoyed more airtime and coverage than his rivals: Dr Abdullah Abdullah, who prefers to be known as just Abdullah, a former challenger to the presidency and now a force to be reckoned with; and Ashraf Ghani, the soft-spoken World Bank type who traded in his Zegna suit for a cool fez and has Bill Clinton’s campaign manager running his campaign. But Karzai has the obvious power of incumbency and is an ethnic Pashtun who has created a consortium of crafty alliances with dubious warlords. But the question is being asked in this campaign: are these alliances detrimental to the people of Afghanistan?

Simply put, no. Obviously allowing armed warlords to conduct a thriving drug trade is problematic but Karzai has managed a unity that seemed impossible five years ago. Take the simple case of warlord Rashid Dostum. He ran in the first elections, he commands a five thousand-man army, possesses the capacity to shake up the ethnic Uzbek vote — but now he sides with Karzai. That’s clearly not enough though: Karzai needs to indicate that he is willing to curtail the warlords’ mounting excesses, or the allegation that he has ceded de facto power to a bunch of no-good thugs will gain strength.

... contd.