The presidential election of 2009 – in which Hamid Karzai gained a second term – was a highly contentious affair, and neither the Afghan political system nor the international community came through it with flying colors. Together with the battle over the Taliban’s future role in the country, the struggle for power in 2014 could reanimate divisions that take the country back to the brink of a wider civil war, with the liberal technocrats of Kabul crushed between a resurgent Northern Alliance and a wider “Pashtun Pact.”