AFGHAN PRESIDENT Hamid Karzai will face a crisis of legitimacy and a legal challenge to his re-election if he is proclaimed the outright winner of Afghanistan’s presidential ballot tomorrow, opponents and an UN official warned yesterday.
The warning came as his chief rival accused him of “stealing” the election. In a withering attack on an election process that Afghanistan’s international backers are desperate should be seen as legitimate, Abdullah Abdullah pinned the blame on Mr Karzai and his team for what he claimed were fraudulent results emerging from the country’s southern and eastern regions.
“It was led by Mr Karzai. He knew. He knew that without this he cannot win, about that I have no doubt in my mind,” Mr Abdullah said.
Mr Karzai’s supporters, who have been collating their own results from individual polling stations, are convinced that the president has won a landslide victory with more than 50 per cent of the vote. Some are predicting he may get as much as 70 per cent.
But a senior UN official warned there would be “no real legitimacy if Karzai claims to have won on the first round”. He said: “If the international community say it is all wonderful, they lose further credibility and are associated with an illegitimate government. And if they say it was fraud then their publics will say ‘why are we there then?’ Neither way is it a good result for Afghanistan.”
The prospect of a protracted post-election dispute is an unhappy one for the US and its main partners in the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan – Britain, Canada and Germany. Those nations are eager to declare the vote acceptable and avoid the uncertainty and confrontation that could aggravate an already parlous security situation.
Yesterday, US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Adm Mike Mullen said the situation was “serious and deteriorating”, and that the Taliban insurgency “has gotten better, more sophisticated in their tactics”.
An ABC news/Washington Post poll last week showed that US public support for the war in Afghanistan has declined steeply, with more than half of the responents saying for the first time that the war is not worth fighting.
Fifty-one per cent of Americans say it is not, compared with 47 per cent who say it is.
A flawed election will not make it easier to justify the conflict. Mr Abdullah told the Guardian he had evidence of widespread fraud in the south and east, where Taliban violence during Thursday’s poll is thought to have suppressed voter turnout.
He accused the head of the border police in Kandahar province, Gen Abdul Raziq, of intimidation and of moving ballot boxes into his house, which only Karzai supporters were allowed to enter.
“We will challenge it through legal means, we will exhaust every avenue legally in order to prevent this sort of big rigging. This is stealing a nation’s verdict,” Mr Abdullah said. He denounced the chief of the Independent Election Commission (IEC) – the body that foreign election observers have criticised for being full of Karzai appointees – as working “for Mr Karzai and not the good of the country”.
The Election Complaints Commission – an independent organisation controlled by international officials – said it had received 225 complaints, including allegations of voter intimidation, ballot box stuffing and bias by IEC officials. It said it was concentrating on 35 cases that could potentially affect the outcome of the election. The first set of electoral data is set to be published tomorrow.
Mirwais Yasini, a minor presidential candidate, also alleged massive voter fraud when he displayed bags full of ballots he claimed were cast for him in Kandahar but were taken away to be destroyed.
Mr Abdullah said that in the northern provinces – where he did not allege widespread fraud – he was ahead of Mr Karzai in about 16 provinces. But despite his defiant tone, he said he would refrain from calling for the kind of demonstrations that plunged Iran into post-electoral convulsions earlier this summer. “I mobilised my supporters and I can restrain them,” he said.
The senior UN official warned that the only solution would be a clean second-round contest or some conciliatory deal between Mr Abdullah and Mr Karzai.