What's going to happen now that over a quarter of all ballots have been thrown out in Afghanistan's parliamentary elections?

The Independent Electoral Commission, the lead electoral body in Afghanistan, has now released its preliminary results, and candidates and voters now have an opportunity to present challenges to those results. So now it's up to the independent election body, the Electoral Complaints Commission in Afghanistan, to basically review those challenges as well as almost 5,000 complaints that have been made to them thus far. It's going to be a long process and a very contentious process. The Afghan electoral authorities are supposed to release the results—the final results—on October 31, but it's unlikely at this point that those results will happen at that time.

What needs to happen for the country to have a stable government?

At this point, we do not know how Afghans will perceive the parliament and these elections, whether they perceive the parliament as a real place to channel their grievances. But ultimately in Afghanistan, the parliament is very much a minor player in their whole system of governance. It serves as a very minor and weak check on executive power, which is held by President Karzai. And the judiciary in Afghanistan is even weaker. Ultimately for Afghanistan's government to be stable, it needs to be a much more inclusive political system that is able to balance the powers between the local government and the executive branch, as well as among many different Afghan communities and political leaders. Currently as the political system stands, it's very overcentralized in the position of President Karzai and there are few checks on his power, and very few ways for Afghans to hold their leaders accountable or to channel some of their grievances.

What can the United States do to help?

At this point, it's very difficult for the United States to push through some of the governmental reforms that are required to make the political system much more sustainable, because at the core of it, it's a system that needs to be more decentralized, and President Karzai is resistant to those changes. But at this point, the international community needs to do a number of different things. First, it needs to push for much more inclusive reconciliation talks among various factions within Afghan society and not just between the Taliban insurgents and Afghanistan's government, but through a broad swath of society. The second thing it needs to do is put much greater pressure on the Afghan government to implement some of the reforms that it's already promised in terms of devolving some budgetary authority to the provinces in terms of tackling corruption much more effectively and in terms of implementing some electoral reforms, which would change the way that Afghanistan's electoral system runs, which is currently a single, nontransferable voting system, which many believe is not an effective way to elect Afghanistan's representatives.