Karzai: Fraud 'inevitable in a budding democracy'

With over 90 per cent of votes counted in Afghanistan's presidential election, President Karzai has won a clear majority, yet Western officials believe as many as one in six votes is tainted by fraud mostly favoring the incumbent. In an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro, Mr Karzai dismissed accusations that he rigged the election and said that fraud was 'inevitable in a budding democracy'.

With over 90 per cent of votes counted in Afghanistan's presidential election, President Karzai has won a clear majority, yet Western officials believe as many as one in six votes is tainted by fraud mostly favoring the incumbent. "President Karzai hit back yesterday at critics accusing him of massive vote stealing in Afghanistan's elections, saying that fraud was to be expected in a young democracy and that he was being attacked by the US because it wanted him to be more docile," The Times reported. "Mr Karzai has had tense meetings with Richard Holbrooke, the US regional envoy, who urged him to face a second round in the disputed elections, and earlier in the year with Joe Biden, the US Vice-President, who walked out of a meeting with him. "His confrontational stance has been interpreted as an attempt to carry favour with the Afghan people, who are often resentful of the 100,000 foreign troops on their soil. Mr Karzai, who swept to power after the 2001 US invasion and was elected President in 2004, has been seen as dependent on the US. He said yesterday that it was in no one's interests for him to be an American puppet. "He also brushed off what Abdullah Abdullah, his main presidential rival, called 'state-engineered' vote-rigging and told the newspaper Le Figaro that fraud was 'inevitable in a budding democracy'. Dr Abdullah has warned of instability if the allegations are not addressed seriously." On Sunday, The New York Times reported: "Afghans loyal to President Hamid Karzai set up hundreds of fictitious polling sites where no one voted but where hundreds of thousands of ballots were still recorded toward the president's re-election, according to senior Western and Afghan officials here. "The fake sites, as many as 800, existed only on paper, said a senior Western diplomat in Afghanistan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the political delicacy of the vote. Local workers reported that hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of votes for Mr Karzai in the election last month came from each of those places. That pattern was confirmed by another Western official based in Afghanistan. " 'We think that about 15 per cent of the polling sites never opened on Election Day,' the senior Western diplomat said. 'But they still managed to report thousands of ballots for Karzai.' "Besides creating the fake sites, Mr Karzai's supporters also took over approximately 800 legitimate polling centers and used them to fraudulently report tens of thousands of additional ballots for Mr Karzai, the officials said." The New York Times later said: "The United Nations-backed commission serving as the ultimate arbiter of the Afghan elections announced Tuesday that it had found 'clear and convincing evidence of fraud' in a number of polling stations and ordered a partial recount even as election officials declared that President Hamid Karzai had won a majority of the vote. "With 91.6 per cent of the polling stations counted, the officials said, Mr Karzai had won 54.1 per cent of the vote, and his main challenger, the former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, won 28.3 per cent. The tally, if certified, would mean that Mr Karzai would be declared the victor without the need for a runoff because he would won more than 50 per cent of the vote.. "But international election officials and observers immediately cast those figures in doubt. They said the tallies included hundreds of thousands of suspect votes that would have been excluded if Afghan election officials had correctly used safeguards built into the computerised counting system. "One Western official said Mr Karzai would not have made the 50 per cent mark if the triggers built into the computer counting system were enforced as planned. " 'He was below 50 per cent when you exclude the obviously fraudulent votes,' the diplomat said of Mr Karzai." The Wall Street Journal added: "Western officials now say they believe almost one of every six of Afghanistan's more than 25,000 polling stations is tainted by fraud, most of it on behalf of Mr Karzai... "US Ambassador Karl Eikenberry met Monday evening with Mr Karzai and encouraged the president not to claim victory based on those results, said a US official, while the US also is pressing Afghan election officials to disqualify tainted votes before announcing a tally. " 'The United States and the international community are looking to the Independent Electoral Commission to carry out its legal mandate to count all votes and to exclude all fraudulent votes,' said Caitlin Hayden, a US embassy spokeswoman in Kabul. 'Anything less than rigorous vetting would call into question the credibility of the announced results.' "If Afghan election officials don't change course, the US wants Mr Karzai to wait on United Nations-sponsored election-fraud investigators to examine the claims and certify the results, a process likely to take weeks, the official said. In that case, the US - concerned about the legitimacy of the election and the government - could be largely dependent on the election investigators to declare enough fraud that Mr Karzai is required to compete in a runoff to avoid widespread unrest." In an analysis for Time magazine, Tim McGirk said: "Karzai's legitimacy is shot. Even before the election, many Afghans (though perhaps not a majority) were angry with him over his failure to curb a system of corruption and patronage that had paralysed efforts to repair the war-thrashed nation. The international aid community is disheartened by the prospect of another five years of a government that is infested with warlords and drug traffickers. And Washington is fed up with Karzai's duplicity and fecklessness. Despite the fact that he came to power on the back of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, Karzai used the latest poll as a chance to portray himself as the one Afghan willing to stand up and criticise the way US-led coalition forces have inflicted civilian casualties while chasing the Taliban. 'Karzai wants his legacy to be an Afghan leader who stood up against the foreigners,' says Haroun Mir, director of Afghanistan's Centre for Research and Policy Studies. 'He also thinks the international community is trying to undermine him.' "Public opinion in both the US and Europe is tiring of bad news from Afghanistan. President Obama faces questions from both the left and right. What is the point of pouring more troops or billions of dollars into Afghanistan, his critics say, when the Taliban seem to be gaining ground and the money simply vanishes into the baggy pockets of Kabul officials? "But if the US quit on Karzai, the result would be disastrous for both Afghanistan and the US, says Ashraf Ghani, a US-educated presidential contender. 'If the US leaves, it will be 'dog eat dog' here. We'll be the human zoo of the region,' says Ghani. Like other Afghan intellectuals, Ghani foresees a grisly scenario in which the Taliban sweeps into Kabul, taking revenge on thousands of 'collaborators' who helped Karzai and the Americans. Millions of ordinary Afghan citizens - including those who embraced the Western promises of education for girls, democracy and a place for Afghanistan in the 21st century - would flee the country."