THE WHITE House was engaged in a dangerous and unpredictable stand-off with Afghan president Hamid Karzai yesterday after a UN commission offered damning evidence of fraud in the presidential election, increasing pressure for a second round of voting.
The Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) found that almost one in three of Mr Karzai’s votes would have to be disqualified, cutting his total by 954,526 votes and reducing his percentage of the vote from 55 per cent to 48.3 per cent.
Anything less than 50 per cent should trigger a run-off, but Mr Karzai was resisting such a move.
The findings were a blow to the Afghan president, who has long maintained that the extent of electoral fraud was exaggerated by the international media. Diplomats in Kabul warned of a potential “car crash” between Mr Karzai and the international community.
Any delay beyond the next fortnight will see the onset of winter, making another election impractical in the country’s remote districts and possibly leaving Afghans in political limbo until the spring.
Fears of an impasse rose when an Afghan body packed with Mr Karzai’s appointees, the Independent Election Commission (IEC), said yesterday that it, not the ECC, had the right to decide whether to hold a run-off against Mr Karzai’s nearest challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister.
Washington fears that the Taliban, who are expanding their influence across Afghanistan, could exploit any political vacuum.
US president Barack Obama led western leaders in stepping up pressure on Mr Karzai to hold a second round to confer legitimacy on the Kabul government.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs made it clear that Mr Obama wanted the Afghans to hold a run-off. “It is now up to the Afghans to make this legitimate,” he said.
While Mr Gibbs has previously said removing all US troops from Afghanistan was not a viable option, he issued a veiled threat to Mr Karzai, saying that regardless of whether 40,000 extra troops were sent, the almost 68,000 US troops already there needed a credible partner in Kabul.
Other international leaders including British prime minister Gordon Brown also pressed Mr Karzai to accept the UN findings.
Mr Brown made his third call to Mr Karzai within a week, telling the Afghan president he should accept a run-off because he was likely to win.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Nato secretary general, said in Brussels that no extra troops would be sent to Afghanistan until the political crisis was resolved, including the 500 extra British troops announced last week.
“I hope that we will have a clarification of the political situation in Afghanistan, because time is not on our side,” Mr Rasmussen said.
The documents published by the ECC showed many of the ballot boxes inspected by officials had voting papers all marked in a uniform way or voting forms not folded in half, suggesting that they were not posted through the slot at the top of the ballot box.
Among the evidence uncovered by the ECC were:
More than 30 polling stations where 100 per cent of the valid votes went to one candidate.
A polling station where all the votes showed identical markings, none of the ballots were folded and all 600 votes went to one candidate, but they were recorded as votes for another candidate.
In almost a third of the sample (92 polling stations), 100 per cent of the papers had uniform markings. Another 69 stations recorded 75 per cent of the ballots showing uniform markings.
In 41 polling stations all of the ballot papers were not folded.
It was on the basis of those discoveries that the ECC ordered the IEC to invalidate percentages of each candidate’s vote, a complex method that has not previously been used in an election where it might have a decisive impact.
But one UN official said the amount of votes disqualified was only a “subset” of actual fraud which would have been discovered had the ECC widened its inquiry.
“We will never know the full extent of the fraud,” the official said. – (Guardian service)