Credible presidential elections in Afghanistan in 2014 will help determine the willingness of foreign donors to continue providing a range of financial support for the country after NATO troops leave, a U.S. official said at a U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) event exploring “Elections, Reconciliation and the Final Two Years of Afghanistan’s Transition: Perspectives from the International Community.”

“The elections in 2014 are extremely important,” James DeHart, director of the U.S. State Department’s Office for Afghanistan, told the audience. They’re vital “for Afghanistan’s future stability (and) important for continued donor support to Afghanistan.”

DeHart and Scott Worden, senior policy adviser for the Office of Afghanistan and Pakistan Affairs at the U.S. Agency for International Development, reviewed U.S. policy on the transition in the second of two panel discussions at the Dec. 11 event. In both panels, experts including Francesc Vendrell, a former special envoy of the United Nations Secretary-General to Afghanistan and onetime European Union special representative to Afghanistan, urged the U.S. government to formulate clearer policies and positions on issues that will be pivotal to the transition, including potential reconciliation among Afghanistan’s warring factions and the steps needed for credible elections to choose the country’s next president in 2014 and members of Parliament in 2015.

“There is not yet any coherent or unified approach as to how to deal with the Taliban in the coming years,” said Vendrell, an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

USIP President Jim Marshall told the gathering that he heard “consistent concern” about the upcoming political transition during his visit to Afghanistan in August. “We’re fairly sure that we can get a military transition that works,” Marshall told the audience in brief opening remarks. “But we’re also very sure that if the political transition does not work well, the military transition won’t either and that there will be all kinds of civil strife caused as a result.”

Leaders of Afghanistan and countries supporting them such as the U.S. have two years to shepherd an effective transition, as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization hands over ever-more security responsibility to Afghan police and military forces in preparation for the coalition’s drawdown at the end of 2014. A range of Afghan political leaders, including representatives of the Taliban and the militant group Hezb-e-Islami are due to meet on the outskirts of Paris next week under the auspices of the Foundation for Strategic Research, but a Taliban spokesman said the group wouldn’t engage in peace or reconciliation talks, the Associated Press reported Dec. 10.

Andrew Wilder, USIP’s director of Afghanistan and Pakistan Programs, just returned from a week in the Afghan capital Kabul and said the visit left him “cautiously optimistic.” Constant talk about the departure of troops and the fear that everyone is heading to the exits is generating a lot of anxiety there, Wilder told the USIP audience. While that can have negative consequences to the extent that factional leaders in Afghanistan and in the region hedge their bets in anticipation of gaining more influence, it also has some positive effects, he said.

“To a greater extent than I’ve ever seen, Afghan political elites are investing a lot of time right now, every evening in Kabul and elsewhere, trying to talk about what next,” Wilder said. They’re discussing ways to build confidence, consensus and coalitions for a legitimate follow-on government. Motivating factors include protecting the gains they have made in the past 10 years, whether licit or not, and the fear of returning to anarchy, he said.

Activity has picked up in recent weeks on the question of reconciliation between the government of Afghanistan and the Taliban, including the High Peace Council’s visit to Pakistan, the subsequent release of some Taliban prisoners and some signals from Pakistani leaders that they may be willing to play a more constructive role in the process of reaching a negotiated settlement, Wilder said.

A national dialogue is needed to “change the strategic logic” in Afghanistan, said retired U.S. Army Battalion Task Force Commander Colonel Christopher Kolenda, who now serves as a senior adviser on Afghanistan and Pakistan at the Defense Department. He noted that he was speaking for himself rather than the department.

“There’s a bit of a strategic paradox,” Kolenda said. “There appears to be a comfort in the status quo of conflict – people have been doing it for long enough and a lot of their resources and thinking are aligned toward that.”

Civil society needs to be more central to the peace process, said panelist Clare Lockhart, co-founder and director of the Institute for State Effectiveness in Washington. “Often civil society is treated as an afterthought,” she said. Western officials also need to amend their notion of an inherently corrupt Afghanistan because much of that was spurred by the massive influx of foreign aid, she said.

India’s interest in influencing Afghanistan and Pakistan’s fears of the future regional dynamic also need to be taken into account, said National Defense University Distinguished Research Fellow Thomas F. Lynch III, a former U.S. Army officer who was special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Among Pakistan’s concerns is the nature and role of special operations forces that the U.S. wants to leave behind for training and counter-terrorism operations.

“The U.S. must think more clearly about the future of conflict in Afghanistan than it has been to date,” Lynch said. “A tenable political reconciliation strategy for Afghanistan must be tolerable in New Delhi while at the same time being deferential to Pakistan’s most haunting fears that remaining American intelligence and special forces components might be repetitively used in cross-border sovereignty violations of Pakistan.”

Thomas Ruttig, founder and senior analyst at the Afghanistan Analysts Network, said the international community needs to work harder toward an agreement between the government and the Taliban. He criticized the U.S. decision to set 2014 as a date for withdrawing troops. Ruttig said it originally was announced as a conditions-based target but has since become a firm deadline.

The U.S. role in Afghanistan’s next elections will be to advise on and monitor the process without taking positions on candidates, DeHart and USAID’s Worden said.

“We’ll be paying very close attention to the inclusiveness, to the role of civil society, to the role of women in the process,” DeHart said. Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission just announced voter registration planned for later in the spring, and legislation is being debated related to the balloting, he said.

“The elections in 2014 are going to be extraordinarily difficult and challenging” because of security and logistics, DeHart said. “The bottom line for these elections will be the legitimacy in Afghan eyes.”

Three main areas that need to be addressed to improve the legitimacy of the elections over the widely-criticized balloting in 2009 and 2010, Worden said, are the independence and credibility of electoral institutions such as the Independent Elections Commission and any complaints mechanism; inclusive participation, especially of women and of under-represented groups in Pashtun areas of the South and East; and fraud mitigation. In each of the earlier two elections, 1.2 million of more than 4 million ballots initially cast were thrown out for fraud.

Steve Coll, president of the New America Foundation and a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, said the transition will affect the calculus of the Taliban and its backers, especially the question of whether the resulting nation state, however flawed, is at least stable, can keep control of major cities and maintain financial support of the international community.

“If the result of this election is the prospect of more military stalemate, then I think both Taliban leadership and the government of Pakistan might continue along the tentative track that they’ve started, seeking forms of political settlement in lieu of military victory,” Coll said.

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