[STREAM.WSJ] Potential fraud has become a key theme of Afghanistan's presidential race, with two of the three main contenders warning against attempts to rig the April 5 vote to favor President Hamid Maybe I'll join the TalibanKarzai
... A former Baltimore restaurateur, now 12th and current President of Afghanistan, displacing the legitimate president Rabbani in December 2004. He was installed as the dominant political figure after the removal of the Taliban regime in late 2001 in a vain attempt to put a
Pashtunface on the successor state to the Taliban. After the 2004 presidential election, he was declared president regardless of what the actual vote count was. He won a second, even more dubious, five-year-term after the 2009 presidential election. His grip on reality has been slipping steadily since around 2007, probably from heavy drug use...
's favorite candidate.
An election perceived as stolen could plunge the country into fresh conflict just as U.S.-led international forces withdraw, foreign aid shrinks and Taliban attacks persist.
All the main candidates say they want to sign a security agreement with the U.S.--which Mr. Karzai has blocked--that would allow some American forces to remain after December. Turmoil over a disputed election, however, could disrupt those plans, too.
While Kabul officials deny bias or plans to stuff ballot boxes, the possibility that the election's legitimacy will be thrown into doubt is increasingly worrying the U.S. and allied governments that have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on Afghanistan since 2001.
"The responsibility of the candidates is extremely important. If Afghanistan, God forbid, will be destabilized again, nobody will be a winner," former Foreign Minister Zalmai Rassoul
... former foreign minister and a very close confidant of Hamid Karzai. Before serving as foreign minister Rassoul also spent seven years laboring as a national security adviser to the president. An ethnic Pashtun born in Kabul, Rassoul was the valedictorian of his class at the illustrious Franco-American school in Kabul, Lycee Istiqal. He has an MD from the Paris Medical School in France.....
, seen as Mr. Karzai's presidential pick, said in a Wall Street Journal interview.
"The worst scenario would be that the election will not go well," he said. "The Afghan people will lose all the trust in the democratic process and we will go back to square one--instead of the ballot box, the people will use their Kalashnikovs to take power."
Mr. Karzai's re-election in 2009 was marred by massive falsification; roughly a million ballots cast on his behalf were disqualified by the country's electoral watchdog. Some of the worst fraud occurred in the perilous areas of the country's south and east, where Taliban threats kept voters away from the polls, and local officials simply stuffed the ballot boxes, according to witnesses and election observers.
With the security situation more precarious now, many Afghans are concerned about more-brazen rigging--especially because the electoral watchdog, which in 2009 was dominated by international representatives, is now made up of Mr. Karzai's appointees.
Under Afghan law, if no candidate wins an outright majority on April 5, the two top vote-getters will contest a runoff election, likely in June.
Though there are no reliable polls in Afghanistan, the three contenders with the most-active campaigns and widest support are former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah
... the former foreign minister of the Northern Alliance government, advisor to Masood, and candidate for president against Karzai. Dr. Abdullah was born in Kabul and is half Tadjik and half Pashtun...
, who finished second to Mr. Karzai in 2009; former finance minister Ashraf Ghani; and Mr. Rassoul--a late entrant perceived as lagging behind the two others.
"The way he is doing so far, [Rassoul] will not be one of the first two--unless there is another way, using the government network and, through that, stuffing the boxes," said Nader Nadery, chairman of the Free and Fair Election Forum of Afghanistan, which aims to deploy some 10,000 observers on election day. "And if that's the case, you will unfortunately have a situation where the other two may not accept the first-round result, and the contested first-round result will prolong a political crisis."