Some interesting post election news today. First up is Afghanistan, where President Hamid Karzai has agreed to a run-off following the controversial August election. This seems like the only credible thing to do with a UN-backed commission having said as many as a third of Karzai’s were fraudulent. It should also make it easier for the US to align itself with him if, as is almost certain, he wins the run-off.

One of the most interesting elements of this story, though, is not that Karzai gave way and agreed to a run-off (that was pretty much inevitable under such heavy US pressure), but who was putting the pressure on--US Sen. John Kerry and not the special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke.

Jamie Fly, blogging for The National Review, has a good look at why Holbrooke has apparently been marginalized:

‘The subtext here appears to be that Holbrooke, who reportedly engaged in several shouting matches with Karzai in recent months, has so undermined the US relationship with Karzai that he had to be sidelined.’

But he goes on to say that despite Kerry’s apparent shuttle diplomacy success, the fact that it was Kerry and not Clinton mediating suggests some real underlying problems with the Obama team’s civilian efforts in the country:

‘Clinton’s notable absence on Afghanistan policy has led many experts to express concerns that the calibre of the US civilian team working on Afghanistan does not match that of the likes of Gen. David Petraeus, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and other military leaders handling this issue. There has been no comprehensive civilian assessment or plan put forward by Ambassador Holbrooke and his army of staffers on the seventh floor at State to accompany General McChrystal’s assessment. US political goals for the country are unclear.’

Still, credit to Kerry for getting the job done this time. Though this of course begs the question of where this leaves Obama’s Afghan diplomacy. This isn’t going to be the last time someone is going to be needed to put out a fire there. So who’ll do it next time?

Shifting focus to Southeast Asia meanwhile, the re-vamped cabinet of re-elected President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has disappointed reform-minded analysts, according to a New York Times piece that suggests politics has trumped expertise:

‘With the liberal former general having won re-election in a landslide victory in July, anticipation had been high that he would fill his cabinet with effective technocrats who could tackle persistent issues like endemic graft, crumbling infrastructure and an unreliable judicial system.

‘Instead, the president appears to have reserved only the economic posts for technocrats, while doling out others, like the key Ministry of Law and Human Rights, to members of the handful of political parties that supported his re-election bid.’

Five times as many people have died from heroin overdoses in NATO nations over the past 8 years than the total number of NATO soldiers killed in Afghanistan, according to the UN's Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). This week the group released their report on the issue: ‘Addiction, Crime and Insurgency: The transnational threat of Afghan opium.’

It says 100,000 people die from opium abuse each year, out of an estimated 15 million users worldwide. Europe tops the user list, with China, Pakistan, India and other parts of Asia also ranked as major consuming nations. Aids/HIV are cited as a closely related problem.

In quite a vivid statement, UNODC chief Antonio Maria Costa describes the situation in the region: ‘The Silk Route, turned into a heroin route, is carving out a path of death and violence through one of the world's most strategic yet volatile regions.’

Afghanistan now produces 92 per cent of the world's opium in a market worth around $65 billion, and the production of the substance has surged in the past decade, exceeding worldwide consumption levels.

The report also notes an interesting fact: there is an unaccounted stockpile of 12,000 tons of opium believed to be stored in Afghanistan and possibly also in transit.

But in an interesting opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal some time back, Theodore Dalrymple questioned the conventional wisdom on opium consumption (‘Poppycock’). He basically argued that quitting opium is perhaps not as tough as some would like to make it out to be, and came up with some unique perspectives to try and back this up, including one which actually credits Chairman Mao as a drug therapist for the masses:

‘Thousands of American servicemen returning from Vietnam, where they had addicted themselves to heroin, gave up on their return home without any assistance whatsoever.’

‘…In China, millions of Chinese addicts gave up with only minimal help: Mao Tse-Tung's credible offer to shoot them if they did not. There is thus no question that Mao was the greatest drug-addiction therapist in history.’

As Barack Obama kicks off a reconsideration of US policy in Afghanistan, former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has waded into the debate on troop numbers. On Facebook. Unsurprisingly, she called on the US to stay the course and, again perhaps unsurprisingly, there is nothing particularly new or incisive about her critique:

‘We can win in Afghanistan by helping the Afghans build a stable representative state able to defend itself. And we must do what it takes to prevail. The stakes are very high. The 9/11 attacks were planned in Afghanistan, and if we are not successful there, al-Qaeda will once again find a safe haven, the Taliban will impose its cruelty on the Afghan people, and Pakistan will be less stable.’

But, for better or worse she’s still news, and still extremely popular among the grassroots of the Republican Party.

Anyone looking for an interesting take on the problems in Afghanistan, though, should check out the ‘Rethinking Security’ blog, run by security analyst Adam Elkus. Yesterday he picked up on an interesting op-ed by Joshua Foust questioning the wisdom of trying to bribe the tribes in Afghanistan.

“Despite three horrible, bloody wars that killed tens of thousands of British citizens (not just soldiers, but their families as well), [pundits] claim the [19th century] British policy 'worked adequately.' ... Then again, we already tried that. It didn’t work, in part because in Afghanistan the word “tribe” is so ambiguous as to have almost no meaning. ...It’s been decades since anthropologists really thought of 'tribe' as a useful descriptor for Afghan communities—'tribe' is a flexible concept, with identical names applying to different levels of genealogy. It also implies a hierarchy where none exists—if you know someone is from a 'tribe' that is 'higher' than his neighbor’s 'clan,' will that give you any tools for leveraging influence or power? I assure you, it will not.”