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| Afghanistan | |
| U.N.'s Afghan vote fraud row shows split in West | |
| 2009-10-04 | |
| This is a significant story. KABUL (Reuters) - A U.S. diplomat's scathing charge that the United Nations effectively let Afghanistan's election be stolen has exposed the international community's disunity and may help explain Washington's new doubts about the war. The outcome of the August 20 election has yet to be decided, amid accusations of massive fraud, and in public all Western diplomatic missions in Kabul say they are reserving judgment until a complaints process is complete. In a strongly worded letter to Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, veteran U.S. diplomat Peter Galbraith accused his Norwegian U.N. boss of blocking anti-fraud efforts, which Galbraith said would have forced a second round of voting if carried out properly. The United Nations responded by sacking Galbraith. The U.N. mission chief, Kai Eide, has rejected the criticism and says he supports a fraud investigation which is still under way. But the ramifications of the dispute go far beyond the question of who will occupy the number two post at the mission's headquarters in a secluded compound in central Kabul, and could help decide the future of the eight-year-old war. Galbraith is a close ally of Richard Holbrooke, President Barack Obama's U.S. officials have cited the dispute over the election results as one of the main reasons for the Obama administration's unexpected decision last month to begin a new review of its whole policy toward the region. The commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan has asked for tens of thousands of additional troops to carry out an overhauled counter-insurgency strategy that would focus on protecting the Afghan population. Some in the Obama administration favor other options, including scaling the mission back. In his letter, excerpts of which were published in the New York Times, Galbraith wrote that he had tried to prevent Afghanistan's election commission from including "votes that it knew to be fraudulent" from its preliminary tallies. Galbraith said Eide blocked him from intervening after Afghan President Hamid Karzai complained.
"Given our mandate to support 'free and fair elections' I felt UNAMA could not overlook the fraud without compromising our neutrality and becoming complicit in a cover-up," he wrote, referring to the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan. In the end, the provisional results gave Karzai 54.6 percent of the vote, enough to avoid a second round run-off. Those results included whole villages where every single vote cast was for Karzai, often with the president receiving exactly 500 or 600 votes at multiple polling stations. Continued... | |
| Posted by:phil_b |
| #3 ION BHARAT RAKSHAK > ADVANTAGE CHINA, INDIA AS G-20 REPLACES THE G-8. * SAME > VLADIMIR PUTIN SAYS HE COULD RETURN TO LEAD RUSSIA UNTIL YEAR 2024. |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2009-10-04 09:38 |
| #2 Once the US steps back, NATO will be out of Afghanistan before you can say 'transatlantic solidarity'. Yup. Guess I should buy stock in Air Ukraine, though I'd never fly in one of their airplanes ... |
| Posted by: Steve White 2009-10-04 01:11 |
| #1 It looks like the UN's corruption and incompetance will be used as 'a' and perhaps 'the' justification for a scaled back Afghan commitment. Once the US steps back, NATO will be out of Afghanistan before you can say 'transatlantic solidarity'. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2009-10-04 00:35 |