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Why has the Taliban been so much more effective in presenting messages that resonate with the Afghan population than the US, the Afghan government & their allies? This text, based on years of field research & the assessment of hundreds of original source materials, examines the information operations & related narratives of Afghan insurgents, especially the Afghan Taliban, & investigates how the Taliban has won the information war. Taliban messaging, wrapped in the narrative of jihad, is both to the point & in tune with its target audiences. On the other hand, the US & its Kabul allies committed a basic messaging blunder, failing to present narratives that spoke to or, often, were even understood by their target audiences. Importantly, the text systematically explains why the US lost this 'battle of the story' in Afghanistan, & argues that this defeat may have cost the US the entire war, despite its conventional & technological superiority.

The article of record as published may be found at https://doi.org/10.1177/2347797020906635 ; This article's primarily focus concerns Afghanistan's 'democratic' electoral processes and procedures. Fraud and other critical aspects of the 2018 election for the Wolesi Jirga, Afghanistan's lower house of parliament, are systematically assessed and official election data and results are examined in depth. As witnessed in earlier Wolesi Jirga elections, this legislative election was duplicitous and unrepresentative. By definition, a democratic legislature serves as the voice of a country's population. Assessing the voting results in Kabul, the largest and most important province, can summarise the problems of the election.The leading 'vote getter' in the Kabul Province got a mere 2.0 per cent of the vote—11,158 out of 666,478 votes cast. Twenty-six of the elected Wolesi Jirga legislators received less than 1 per cent of the vote. Only 23.5 per cent of Kabuli voters voted for a winning candidate. Overall, this article paints a bleak picture of the state of democ- racy in Afghanistan.The already restricted Afghan environment is further hindered by operational mismanagement by the Independent Election Commission (IEC) throughout the electoral process. The single non-transferable voting (SNTV) system again proved to be a disaster resulting in the vast majority of Afghans voting for losing candidates and winning candidates receiving few votes.

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09592318.1404771 ; This article is the latest in a series of published articles systematically examining Afghan Presidential and legislative elections. Structural problems including fraud, ethno-linguistic block voting, and the Single Non-Transferable Vote have had significant impacts on the development of Afghan democratic elections. The challenge now facing the current Afghan government and future elections is the daunting task of uniting the Afghan people while not repeating the electoral mistakes of the past. The tricky balancing act of fostering an overarching national identity without being perceived as privileging particular identities requires strong leadership and a willingness to challenge traditional ethnic, linguistic, and religious norms when need be. Karzai and Ghani Administrations have seriously failed relative to this dynamic.

The article of record as published may be found at https://doi.org/10.1080/09592318.2018.1546273 ; Includes supplementary material ; This article systematically assesses the 2014 Afghanistan Presidential Election, the first transfer of power from President Hamid Karzai to an elected successor, using provincial voting data as well as explicit data from polling centers. The analysis finds unusual voting results in the April election, where no candidate received 50%+1 votes required by the Afghan constitution, versus the voting results realized for the June 'runoff election.' As in other Afghan voting analyses, this article finds voting based on ethno-linguistic preferences, and interestingly found Dr. Ashraf Ghani receiving almost all the swing votes in the runoff election even though the other leading candidate from the April elec- tion all endorsed Dr. Abdullah Abdullah. More importantly, however, the research presented here clearly finds extremely strange voting patterns. For example, the polling data center analysis finds 606 polling places where Ghani received all 600 votes and Abdullah received none and another 900 polling centers that gave virtually all its votes to Ghani. These results in combination with other analyses raise the very real possibility that the election results were illegitimate. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the research to future Afghan elections and their processes as well as to the long- standing conflict in the country.