On September 18, 2,447 candidates, including 386 women, will compete for 249 seats in Afghanistan’s Lower House of Parliament (Wolesi Jirga). Afghans courageous enough to go out and vote certainly have my respect, but for U.S. officials and policymakers, at least three delegitimizing issues should be cause for concern:

(1) the very nature of the electoral process;

(2) parliament’s governing parameters vis-à-vis the President; and

(3) the potential for widespread violence on election day.

First, the electoral process. In many ways, both domestic and international election-monitoring groups have learned valuable lessons from the fraud-tainted presidential election of last year. Simple methods to tamp down corruption include everything from sticking plastic coverings on completed results sheets at polling stations to improving oversight of the data-entry staff at the tally center in Kabul.

Still, elections won’t be perfect. Due to a flawed voter registry, an estimated 5 million of the 17 million voters are thought to be fraudulent or listed as duplicates. Poor vetting has left warlords on the ballot, which is good or bad depending on how you view the conflict. And reports of vote buying, bribery, and intimidation are rife.

In terms of electoral institutions, the new chairman of the Independent Election Commission (IEC), an Afghan body that oversees election logistics, is generally viewed as more independent than the last chairman, who was accused of being a Karzai loyalist. However, the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC), the U.N.-backed election watchdog, is disproportionately weighed in favor of Karzai.

Last March, Karzai issued a decree giving him the power to appoint all five commissioners of the ECC. Up to that time, the UN appointed three members, the Supreme Court appointed one, and the IEC appointed another. Under pressure from the international community, Karzai backed down and agreed to allow the UN to appoint two members. As a diplomat in Kabul observed, “the IEC is stronger, but the ECC is weaker.”

A second problem in Afghanistan’s democracy is the Lower House of Parliament’s level of power and influence vis-à-vis the President. During the 2005 parliamentary elections, President Karzai banned increased the hurdles for the registration of political parties, but, as with warlords on the ballot, this could be good or bad. (Update: The system used during Afghanistan’s 2005 parliamentary and provincial elections was the “single non-transferable vote system” (SNT‑V), in which candidates stood as individuals, not as members of a party. This system produced a highly-fragmented national assembly, but did not ban political parties outright.)

Some might argue that a nascent democracy needs to have a strong executive in order to wield its power effectively. That may very well be true. After all, by banning complicating the system involving political parties, Karzai effectively forced candidates to run as independents, a measure undertaken ostensibly to prevent the emergence of a dominant political party that could oppose his relatively weak executive authority. On the flip side, by lowering the chance of potential opposition, Karzai removed democracy’s most significant feature: a formal system of checks and balances. In one respect, this may signal that the Obama administration has jettisoned the lofty rhetoric of building a “flourishing democracy.” Smart move.

As a counterpoint, banning political parties could thwart the potential for ethnic factionalism. But ethnic factionalism exists in other government institutions, and preventing it in parliament seems to do little for tamping down violence. Moreover, the IEC announced that around 13 percent of polling stations will be closed because of security concerns, most of which are located in the Pashtun south and east. That may result in the elections being perceived as illegitimate among the country’s largest ethnic group.

Closely related to that last point, the final issue is that elections will be marred by widespread violence and threats of insecurity. The Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan (FEFA), an amalgamation of various civil society organizations, has long-term observers present in all 34 provincial capitals, as well as volunteer observers at the district level. This summer, FEFA campaign observers reported widespread problems across the country. For example, death threats were exchanged between two candidates in Takhar Province, and a different Takhar candidate promised to distribute guns to voters who swore on the Holy Quran that they would support him on Election Day. And in Ghor, Nangahar, Uruzgan, and Zabul Provinces, Afghan police were either unresponsive to candidate requests for protection or provided security to candidates the security forces favored.

It’s telling that Afghanistan’s 2010 parliamentary elections were already pushed back from last May to this September. But regardless of when they take place, they seem something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, democratic elections provide a constructive outlet in which political differences can be accommodated in a non-violent way. On the other hand, if the mechanisms and institutions underlying the democratic process are widely perceived as fraudulent, unstable, and inefficient, there seem to be few ways to prevent a “free and fair” election from devolving into a stage-managed shell-game.

That’s the question I ask today over at Downsizing Government. President Obama wants to take the country $50 billion deeper into debt in order to finance more public infrastructure projects. I argue that policymakers should instead give the private sector a chance to satisfy our transportation needs.

The latest feature in Venezuela’s road to socialism was introduced yesterday by President Hugo Chávez. It’s the “Good Life Card,” an instrument that, according to the government, will make it easier to buy groceries at government-owned supermarkets.

Even though Chávez denies that the card is a way “to promote communism,” the concept of a government-sponsored card to buy food in a country suffering from acute shortages is well known. They call it a “rationing card” in Cuba.

I have written often about the Obama administration’s unwillingness to confront reality when it comes to foreign relations. Every time there is a new opportunity to reorient U.S. foreign policy, I hold out some hope that the president has taken stock of our relative security, examined the potential strength of our strategic partners, and decided to discard our costly and counterproductive strategy of the past twenty years, one premised on American global primacy. 

Once again the Obama administration had an opportunity to articulate a more restrained global posture, this time in a speech by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton before the Council on Foreign Relations. And once again the administration has chosen to cling to the tired old approach that holds out the United States as the “indispensable nation” and that saddles American taxpayers and American troops with nearly all of the burdens of global governance.

Secretary Clinton’s speech today reaffirms the administration’s preference for “leadership” in all areas, and a lack of interest in encouraging other countries to play a larger role. Indeed, the speech seems a step backward from a similar address last year. Whereas Clinton eighteen months ago had stressed partnering with other countries and engaging with adversaries, the tone in today’s speech, notes the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, “was subtly different, focused much more on the importance of the U.S. role in managing difficult problems.”

This sort of meddling might appeal to Washington policy elites who are so confident in their ability to “manag[e] difficult affairs”, but it is unnecessary and dangerous. And much of this effort, good intentioned though it may be, is likely to fail.

It need not have been this way. There is ample evidence that a different approach could save hundreds of billions of dollars over the next ten years, while actually enhancing our security by reducing the likelihood that U.S. troops would become involved in unnecessary wars. Though his claims for what he would do to the domestic economy were grandiose, Obama’s rhetoric with respect to foreign policy evinced signs of humility. There was talk of a need to prioritize, and signs of open-mindedness to shedding some of the missions taken on by past presidents.

Within days of the election, however, the president-elect named Clinton Secretary of State, and announced that Robert Gates would remain at DoD. This move signaled continuity over change, and, more worrisome, suggested that Obama was now questioning some of his own good judgment in opposing the war in Iraq and other “dumb wars,” which other members of the incoming administration — Clinton most prominent among them — had supported.

Any lingering humility within the Obama administration seems to have been extinguished. The lesson to take away from the past decades, according to Secretary Clinton, is not of the need to temper our ambitions, husband our resources, and prioritize to deal with the most urgent treats. Rather, we are obligated to “lead” everywhere. “The world looks to us,” she explains:

because America has the reach and resolve to mobilize the shared effort needed to solve problems on a global scale — in defense of our own interests, but also as a force for progress. In this we have no rival.

“For the United States,” she continues, “global leadership is both a responsibility and an unparalleled opportunity.”

The language and tone is strikingly similar to Madeleine Albright’s confident assertion in 1998 that “We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.”

Albright might have been forgiven such arrogance in the days before 9/11, before Afghanistan, before Iraq. But it is unconscionable for U.S. policymakers today to cling to American “leadership” in the face of our recent setbacks. There is an urgent need to rethink the purpose of American power. If we do not, the costs of attempting to police the planet will continue to mount, and the gap between our goals and the resources available to satisfy them will grow wider.

We should reaffirm that our military exists to advance our security, and shed our pretensions that we can manage other people’s conflicts, and build other people’s countries. While we will lead some of the time, we need not, and we should not, lead all of the time. It is long past time for others to step up.

“Techno-Panics” are public and political crusades against the use of new media or technologies, particularly driven by the desire to protect children. As the moniker suggests, they’re not rational. Techno-panic is about imagined or trumped-up threats, often with a tenuous, coincidental, or potential relationship to the Internet. Adam Thierer and Berin Szoka of the Progress & Freedom Foundation have written extensively about techno-panics on the TechLiberationFront blog.

Talking about techno-panic does not deny the existence of serious problems. It merely identifies when policymakers and advocates lose their sense of proportion and react in ways that fail to address the genuine issues—such as censoring a web site because it reveals the fact that some few among a community of tens of millions of people will conspire to break the law.

You’d think that a congressional representative from the heart of Silicon Valley would not sow techno-panic, but here’s Jackie Speier (D‑Calif.) on the Craigslist censorship issue:

“We can’t forget the victims, we can’t rest easy. Child-sex trafficking continues, and lawmakers need to fight future machinations of Internet-driven sites that peddle children.”

Of all representatives in Congress, Speier should know that Craigslist has been making it easier for law enforcement to locate and enforce the law against any perpetrators of crimes against children. Pushing them to rogue sites does law enforcement no good. Censoring Craiglist only masks the problem, which may be in the interest of politicians, but definitely not children.

Today Politico Arena asks:

How does the Koran burning controversy relate to the Ground Zero mosque controversy?

My response:

As with the controversy over the Ground Zero mosque, Rev. Terry Jones and his tiny band of followers have a perfect right to burn Korans, but it would be well beyond insensitive to do so. Yet where are the establishment voices drawing the parallels? Where is President Obama, leaping to his defense?

Instead, we find the likes of the editorialists at the New York Times giving moral instruction to benighted New Yorkers, two-thirds of whom oppose siting a mosque at Ground Zero even as they defend Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s right to build it there. Meanwhile, last evening on the PBS NewsHour, the very essence of establishment TV, the sole guest on the Koran-burning segment, George Washington University’s Marc Lynch, lamented that across the Arab media, “on the jihadist forums, the newspapers, everywhere, there is a lot of focus on the fact that America right now is in the grip of this — of this trend towards anti-Islamic rhetoric and — and actions.” The fact? What Islamophobic “grip” are Americans in? As the most recent records show, hate crimes against Jews in America are 10 times more frequent than against Muslims.