US-UN power tussle over Afghanistan?

Eight years ago today, the US– with the help of non-trivial allies like Russia, Iran, and India– launched its invasion of Afghanistan. Shortly thereafter (though not before) the UN gave a sort of retroactive imprimatur of approval to the invasion. Then in March 2002, the Security Council created the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). Its staff members, now numbering more than 1,000, have the mission of supporting the political and the socio-economic reconstruction of the country.
The US has, however, remained until now as the main external decision-making force inside Afghanistan. That may be about to change, due to the severe resource constraints the US is facing and the evident failure of the US-led occupation forces to resolve Afghanistan’s extremely deep political/security crisis.
Anyway, Pres. Obama is engaged right now in the wide-ranging deliberations that are needed as he addresses the incredibly complex conundrums that his administration faces in Afghanistan. (Another legacy of GWB, we can note.)
Meanwhile, a whole parallel crisis has started erupting in the relations between the US and the UN in Afghanistan. It has been precipitated mainly by the recent actions taken by cowboy US diplomatic “entrepreneur” Peter Galbraith
Until very recently Galbraith was working as deputy to UNAMA’s Norwegian head Kai Eide. But last week Eide abruptly fired fired Galbraith after he publicly accused Eide of suppressing information that UNAMA had gathered about numerous, allegedly serious irregularities in August’s Afghan elections.
Now, Galbraith or someone presumably close to him, has turned that raw data over to the Washington Post, which today published a digest of some of the most damaging parts of it.
The WaPo does not describe how it got hold of this (presumably illegally supplied?) data. But it also does not question its authenticity. Indeed, the reporters in question, Colum Lynch and Joshua Partlow, write,

Dan McNorton, the U.N. spokesman in Kabul, did not challenge the authenticity of the spreadsheet, but he said it should be read with caution. “The information that you have is unsubstantiated raw data and should be treated as such,” he said.

Regarding Galbraith’s own personal history and credentials, we can note that he was an early and strong supporter of Croatia’s move to secede from the Yugoslav (“Southern Slav”) federation, and was subsequently Pres. Clinton’s first ambassador to Croatia. He was a strong cheerleader for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Before and since 2003 he has been a very loud proponent of Kurdish independence and the partition of Iraq.
His actions have often had a gadfly, very destabilizing aspect to them, and though he has been described as a close ally of Obama’s AfPak representative, he was not working for Holbrooke or for the US government in the position he occupied in UNAMA.
The lead of today’s WaPo piece says this:

Voter turnout data kept confidential by the United Nations’ chief envoy in Kabul after Afghanistan’s disputed August presidential election show that in some provinces the official vote count exceeded the estimated number of voters by 100,000 or more, providing further indication that the contest was marred by fraud.
In southern Helmand province — where 134,804 votes were recorded, 112,873 of them for President Hamid Karzai — the United Nations estimated that just 38,000 people voted, and possibly as few as 5,000, according to a U.N. spreadsheet obtained by The Washington Post…

Disturbing allegations, indeed.
Lynch and Partlow write,

Galbraith pressed Eide to turn over to international monitors the United Nations’ estimated turnout data, which indicated that many fewer voters cast ballots in certain provinces than the number of votes recorded by election officials. Galbraith said Eide refused to share this data with the internationally led Electoral Complaints Commission once it became clear that the information reflected poorly on Karzai.
In an interview last week, Eide acknowledged withholding the data, saying that the information could not be verified and that he required a formal request in order to share it. He said he was confronted by a “confusing situation” in which “a lot of information was coming from sources that had their own agenda. We can’t just hand over a bunch of information if we haven’t made a solid assessment of it.”
Eide added that he “really feels offended” by allegations that he favored Karzai, saying he had taken a balanced approach that enjoyed the “unanimous” support of the international community.

Well, Eide is evidently trying to make the best decisions he can, in the very difficult position he finds himself in, in Kabul, caught between the continuing indecision of Washington over Afghanistan and the slow shift in the global balance from “the west” to “the rest.”
The big decisions that will need to be made in Afghanistan will at some point be made, not by Kai Eide but by either Pres. Barack Obama or some “concert” of the world’s great powers, once the US makes the decision– that now seems almost inevitable to me– to ask the other members of the UN Security Council to help bail it out of the extremely difficult situation it finds itself in, in Afghanistan.
Eide, remember, works for the Security Council, acting through the agency of the cipher-like UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon and his UN Department of Peacekeeping Affairs.
Here at JWN, I have been one of very few voices inside the US who have argued for several years now that responsibility for supporting and enabling the reconstruction and political reconstitution of Afghanistan should rightfully and most effectively be undertaken by the UN, rather than under some form of US-led (including US-NATO) “leadership”.
Let’s never forget how geographically and culturally distant the US is from Afghanistan, or the fact that the Security Council’s two non-western permanent members have much greater propinquity to Afghanistan and much deeper direct interests in securing the country’s stabilization than does the US.
(I see that Robert Kaplan has just started discovering things about Beijing’s increasing involvement in Afghanistan that I’ve been writing about for more than a year now.)
Anyway, for those watching how the shift in the US-UN relationship (or “west-rest” relationship) are now playing out over Afghanistan, today’s WaPo piece provides some intriguing tidbits of evidence.
Lynch and Partlow write,

U.N. officials have accused Galbraith of seeking to overturn the Afghan constitution in his zeal to thwart Karzai’s election victory, saying he sought to “disenfranchise” large numbers of potential Karzai voters by closing 1,500 of 6,900 polling stations in volatile regions in southern and southeastern Afghanistan that are populated by members of the president’s Pashtun ethnic group.
Senior U.N. officials also asserted that Galbraith urged Eide in a meeting in early September to consider annulling the elections because of fraud, to convince Karzai and Abdullah to step aside, and to set up a transitional government headed by Ashraf Ghani, a former World Bank economist who finished in fourth place with 2.7 percent of the vote. Galbraith, according to these officials, offered to seek support for the plan from Vice President Biden.
“Here’s a man, a U.N. representative, advocating an unconstitutional change of government,” Vijay Nambiar, Ban’s chief of staff, said of Galbraith. “Of course he was recalled. What would you have expected us to do?”
Galbraith declined to discuss the details of the meeting but said there had been no formal proposal for a new government or a mission to Washington. “It’s a smoke screen to obscure the real issue, which was whether the U.N. should handle electoral fraud,” Galbraith said. “There was no mission to Biden or anybody else because there was no plan to do this.”

We can note that over past years Galbraith worked very closely with Biden over his plans for partitioning Iraq.
Close coordination between UNAMA and the US authorities in Kabul is very evidently something that’s not only desirable, but absolutely essential. But the idea that Galbraith might act as a kind of “back channel” to Obama through Biden seems destabilizing and confusing, though somewhat typical of his previous MO’s.
Lynch and Partlow noted that,

On Saturday, Karl W. Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan… [told] a gathering of two dozen diplomats that the United States has full trust in Eide. “The U.S. Embassy has full confidence in UNAMA and its leadership,” said Caitlin Hayden, a U.S. Embassy spokeswoman.
Edmond Mulet, the U.N. assistant secretary general for peacekeeping, also defended the envoy. “Kai has the full support of the secretary general and of the most important stakeholders, the member states, including the United States, and all the ambassadors and special envoys sitting in Kabul,” he said.

Meanwhile, Galbraith is kicking his heels here in Washington. Actually, having watched him from a distance, I feel pretty certain he’s not just kicking his heels, but must be up to something.
My sense of the current bottom line on this story is that the days when Americans– whether Presidents, presidential envoys, or cowboy diplomatic operators like Peter Galbraith– could just between them determine the entire fate of distant countries with little regard to the needs or preferences of non-Americans are now rapidly coming to an end.