Tajik opposition disputes election of President Rakhmon

The opposition in Tajikistan has said it will mount a legal challenge to the results of parliamentary elections.

The election commission said President Imomali Rakhmon's party won almost all the seats in the lower house of parliament in the election.

It said the opposition Islamic Revival Party won two seats, and five went to minority parties including the communists.

Voting was marred by widespread fraud, international monitors have said.

The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said the polls had "failed on many basic democratic standards".

Challenge

"The election results, though preliminary, are unfair. There was massive falsification. We find it hard to explain this to our constituents," opposition party chief Muhiddin Kabiri told reporters.

"We will take action within the laws of Tajikistan. The Islamic Revival Party is the party of the people. We will express our protest following the legal path in court."

Mr Kabiri said that his party won around 30% of the vote, and not 7.7% as claimed by the Central Elections Commission.

"We will decide whether to take part in the incoming parliament, or whether to declare a hunger strike or organise a rally," he said.

President Rakhmon's People's Democratic Party was said by the election commission to have won 45 of the parliament's 63 seats. An additional nine nominally independent seats went to local leaders seen as loyal to the president.

Election officials claimed a 87.1% turnout, a massive amount in a country where at least one million men are estimated to have fled the country in search of work.

The ruling party earlier said there had been minor violations to the poll which would not affect the will of the Tajik people.

The observers from OSCE and the European Parliament said there had been "serious irregularities" on polling day, including a high prevalence of family and proxy voting and cases of ballot box stuffing.

Lawmakers Stage Rare Protest During Clinton's Russia Visit - washingtonpost.com

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Citing Election Fraud, Minority Parties Walk Out on Last Day of Clinton's Visit

By Philip P. Pan and Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, October 15, 2009

MOSCOW, Oct. 14 -- The minority political parties in Russia's parliament walked out of the chamber in a rare act of protest Wednesday, embarrassing the Kremlin during a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and demanding a recount of votes in local elections widely perceived to have been rigged.

The protest was unusual because the parties generally cooperate with the Kremlin in what the pro-democracy opposition says is a stage-managed legislature. It was the first time in nine years that all lawmakers outside the dominant United Russia party have engineered a walkout, suggesting growing political strains caused by the economic crisis and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's authoritarian policies.

Putin's United Russia, which holds 315 of the 450 seats in the Duma, the lower house of parliament, swept local elections Sunday, winning up to 80 percent of the 7,000-plus races and all but three seats on the 35-member city council in Moscow. Independent observers and opposition parties reported mass electoral violations, including clashes between voters and police in one province.

"This is outright fascism," Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party, said Wednesday after leading his faction out of parliament. He was followed by the Communist Party, which accused Putin of bringing the political system to a new low, and Fair Russia, a left-wing party formed with Kremlin support three years ago.

Ilya Ponomaryov, a Fair Russia lawmaker, said his party was protesting not only election fraud, which has become routine in Russia, but also an attempt by the authorities to forbid debate on the subject in the Duma. "It was done in such an arrogant way that we felt it was useless to stay," he said. "They denied us the right to even speak. That's the minimum in a parliament. Otherwise, what's the point?"

But Ponomaryov said the parties would return to parliament by the end of the week after receiving assurances that President Dmitry Medvedev would meet with them and support a proposal that would forbid the ruling party from silencing them in the future.

There was no immediate comment from Medvedev, who has called for greater political competition in Russia and had praised the elections as "well organized." But speaking to reporters in Beijing, Putin dismissed the fraud allegations. "Those who don't win are never happy," he said.

The protest came on the last day of a visit that Clinton has used to speak relatively forcefully about the shortcomings of the Russian political system, even as she has tried to strengthen relations with the Kremlin and persuade it to support sanctions against Iran if necessary.

Clinton met with human rights activists at a reception at the U.S. ambassador's residence Tuesday. "A society cannot be truly open when those who stand up and speak out are murdered," she told them. She added, "Those of you here today not only understand the risks, you live them."

She continued pressing the issue during an interview on the Echo of Moscow radio station Wednesday, saying that she met an activist at the reception who had been badly beaten and calling such attacks "a matter of grave concern" to the United States.

"All of these issues of imprisonments, detentions, beatings, killings -- it is something that is hurtful to see from the outside," she said. "Every country has criminal elements. Every country has people who try to abuse power. But in the last 18 months -- well, and even going back further -- there have been too many of these incidents."

She added: "I think people want their government to stand up and say this is wrong, and they're going to try to prevent it, and they're going to make sure the people are brought to justice who are engaged in such behavior."

Later, addressing 1,000 students at Moscow State University, Clinton criticized officials in Washington and Moscow who are skeptical of a closer U.S. relationship with Russia.

"I will be the first to tell you, we have people in our government, and you have people in your government, who are still living in the past. They do not believe us and Russia can cooperate to this extent. They do not trust each other," she said. "And we have to prove them wrong."

Clinton did not identify the officials. But the statement recalled a remark by President Obama this year describing Putin as having "one foot" in the "old Cold War approaches to U.S.-Russian relations." Later, after meeting Putin in Moscow, Obama said he was convinced that Putin was interested in moving forward.

Despite the correction, the Obama administration has often highlighted its relationship with Medvedev, the protege Putin selected to succeed him as president. Medvedev has seemed more open to sanctions against Iran and has presented himself as more interested in liberal political reforms than Putin, who remains the most powerful politician in Russia.

Clinton said nothing about the Duma protest before leaving Russia, but State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley expressed concern about the voting fraud allegations and said fair elections are key to fighting corruption. "And, of course," he added, "that's the vision that's been articulated by President Medvedev."

Afghan Voters Ask - Why Bother With a Karzai-Abdullah Runoff? - NYTimes.com

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By SABRINA TAVERNISE

KABUL, Afghanistan — As experts pore over ballots to determine whether the fraud in this country’s presidential election was so big that a runoff vote was required, many Afghans interviewed here on Tuesday shared the same view: Why bother?

In shops, offices and bakeries around the capital, many Afghans said holding a second round of voting to designate a winner simply did not make sense.

It was not that they did not want a final result. Or that they thought the Aug. 20 election had been fraud-free. But years of disappointment in their government has hardened into cynicism, and many said a second round would only lead to another flawed result.

“It’s a waste of time and money,” said Muhammad Hashem Haideri, a 52-year-old movie theater manager. “It would be useless.”

The Afghans interviewed here are only a small sampling of opinion in this ethnic patchwork of a country. The largely Pashtun south supports the incumbent, President Hamid Karzai, who won 54 percent of the vote, enough to avoid a runoff, according to the preliminary tally. His supporters vigorously oppose more voting.

But parts of the north back Mr. Karzai’s main opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, a Tajik. Many of his supporters say that their votes were stolen and want a second round. Mr. Abdullah won about 28 percent of the vote.

Still, the ethnic jumble of Kabul — a dusty, sprawling city of four million whose horse carts and turbaned old men give it the feeling of a frontier town from a past century — provides a fairly broad reach even with a small sample of voices.

Zainab Hussein Zada, 21, a pharmacy student from Parwan Province, in central Afghanistan, said that she was disappointed by the messy result, but that it reflected the level of the country’s democratic skills. Afghanistan, in other words, is not Switzerland, and it is unrealistic to expect it to behave in an election as if it were.

“It was not very fair, and there were many mistakes, but this is the situation in our country,” she said, sitting on a green bench outside the pharmacy department at Kabul University. “It’s better just to accept this result.”

That might seem cynical, considering the level of fraud, but it is a measure of how tired Afghans have become in recent years of the corruption that runs through their government. Their faith in politics is at a dismal low, which, in addition to fears about security, helped suppress voter turnout. A European Union team of observers has estimated that about a million of Mr. Karzai’s votes were suspect.

Habibullah Sarosh, 23, a fast-talking film student, said that in 2004 he waited in line for hours to cast his vote.

“I went to the polling station with a passion in my heart,” he said. “I thought my vote would change the destiny of my country, but I was wrong.”

This time, the polling station was empty, and Mr. Sarosh said he voted “out of obligation.” As for a potential second round, he said, “It won’t solve our problems.”

Some said that getting to the second round would be a good exercise in democracy for Afghans. Mr. Karzai, they said, would be humbled, and his opposition would feel it had accomplished something.

But no one interviewed wanted to go through with the vote, and everyone offered suggestions about how to avoid it. Muhammad Sabur Hashemi, 36, a bridal shop owner, said Mr. Karzai and Mr. Abdullah should join in a coalition government. Mr. Haideri, the theater manager, said the United States government should choose.

“Everybody is dreaming of a good, competent government made by the United States and NATO,” he said mournfully to the thumping beat of a Bollywood movie.

Afghanistan’s problem, he said, was its ethnic divisions.

“The Afghan people are not mentally united,” he said. “An Uzbek will never vote for a Tajik. A Tajik will never vote for a Pashtun.”

Muhammad Ghazi, a 21-year-old baker, had a different view, one far more common among Afghans: a belief that the United States would simply impose its own candidate.

“Even if every Afghan casts their vote for Abdullah, he won’t be president because the foreigners don’t want him to be,” he said, slinging long flat slabs of Afghan bread at customers through a window. “Nobody respected the people’s vote.”

Mr. Haideri strongly disagreed. The election was Afghan, he said, and that was a major part of the problem. The government is a bitter disappointment, he said, particularly after the brutal years of civil war and Taliban rule that had left his theater looking like, in his words, “a trash can.”

“We are watching people with no education become ministers with luxury cars and many houses,” he said. “It makes me feel very sad.”

Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting.

U.N. Data Show Discrepancies in Afghan Vote - washingtonpost.com

Image by jarnocan via Flickr

By Colum Lynch and Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, October 7, 2009

UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 6 -- Voter turnout data kept confidential by the United Nations' chief envoy in Kabul after Afghanistan's disputed August presidential election show that in some provinces the official vote count exceeded the estimated number of voters by 100,000 or more, providing further indication that the contest was marred by fraud.

In southern Helmand province -- where 134,804 votes were recorded, 112,873 of them for President Hamid Karzai -- the United Nations estimated that just 38,000 people voted, and possibly as few as 5,000, according to a U.N. spreadsheet obtained by The Washington Post.

The disclosure of the data seems likely to worsen a credibility crisis for the U.N. special envoy, Kai Eide, who is already facing allegations that he sided with Karzai. In the past week, two U.N. political officers in Kabul have resigned because of a lack of confidence in Eide's leadership, according to U.N. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel issues.

The departures were triggered by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's decision last week to fire Eide's American deputy, Peter W. Galbraith, after he accused his boss of failing to provide Afghan and international officials with evidence of fraud, primarily by Karzai's supporters.

Galbraith pressed Eide to turn over to international monitors the United Nations' estimated turnout data, which indicated that many fewer voters cast ballots in certain provinces than the number of votes recorded by election officials. Galbraith said Eide refused to share this data with the internationally led Electoral Complaints Commission once it became clear that the information reflected poorly on Karzai.

In an interview last week, Eide acknowledged withholding the data, saying that the information could not be verified and that he required a formal request in order to share it. He said he was confronted by a "confusing situation" in which "a lot of information was coming from sources that had their own agenda. We can't just hand over a bunch of information if we haven't made a solid assessment of it."

Eide added that he "really feels offended" by allegations that he favored Karzai, saying he had taken a balanced approach that enjoyed the "unanimous" support of the international community.

The U.N. spreadsheet shows widespread discrepancies between turnout and results, particularly in the volatile southern and eastern provinces where Karzai won with large margins. There are also allegations of fraud by followers of Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai's main competitor, but on a lesser scale.

Diplomats in Kabul have previously referred to such discrepancies, but the U.N. data have not been publicly disclosed until now.

In Paktika province, for example, where Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission has reported that 212,405 valid votes were cast, including 193,541 for Karzai, the United Nations estimated that 35,000 voters turned out. In Kandahar province, which recorded 252,866 votes, including 221,436 for Karzai, the United Nations estimated that 100,000 people voted.

In several provinces won by Abdullah, the United Nations estimated a larger turnout than election officials recorded. In Balkh province, for example, the organization estimated that 450,000 people voted, while the results showed 297,557 votes, 46 percent of them for Abdullah.

Although the estimates in some cases include a broad range of possible turnout, Galbraith said it was important information to share with Afghan officials and international monitors. "I favored turning it over to the Electoral Complaints Commission," he said. "I think we did an excellent job at collecting data. . . . We collected it with the idea of assisting the Afghan legal party that was investigating fraud, but Kai opposed turning it over."

Dan McNorton, the U.N. spokesman in Kabul, did not challenge the authenticity of the spreadsheet, but he said it should be read with caution. "The information that you have is unsubstantiated raw data and should be treated as such," he said.

McNorton said the Afghan and U.N.-backed electoral institutions are carrying out a "robust and methodologically sound" audit of the suspect ballot boxes that will be completed by the end of the week. "To suggest that UNAMA has supported one particular candidate over another is ludicrous," he said, using the acronym for the U.N. mission in Afghanistan.

U.N. officials have accused Galbraith of seeking to overturn the Afghan constitution in his zeal to thwart Karzai's election victory, saying he sought to "disenfranchise" large numbers of potential Karzai voters by closing 1,500 of 6,900 polling stations in volatile regions in southern and southeastern Afghanistan that are populated by members of the president's Pashtun ethnic group.

Senior U.N. officials also asserted that Galbraith urged Eide in a meeting in early September to consider annulling the elections because of fraud, to convince Karzai and Abdullah to step aside, and to set up a transitional government headed by Ashraf Ghani, a former World Bank economist who finished in fourth place with 2.7 percent of the vote. Galbraith, according to these officials, offered to seek support for the plan from Vice President Biden.

"Here's a man, a U.N. representative, advocating an unconstitutional change of government," Vijay Nambiar, Ban's chief of staff, said of Galbraith. "Of course he was recalled. What would you have expected us to do?"

Galbraith declined to discuss the details of the meeting but said there had been no formal proposal for a new government or a mission to Washington. "It's a smoke screen to obscure the real issue, which was whether the U.N. should handle electoral fraud," Galbraith said. "There was no mission to Biden or anybody else because there was no plan to do this."

The disputed election results have complicated the Obama administration's efforts to persuade a skeptical American public of the need to prosecute a war on behalf of Karzai's government.

"There is nothing more important this year than the legitimacy and credibility of our Afghan partners," said J. Alexander Thier, director for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the U.S. Institute of Peace. "The deepening skepticism in the United States about the entire engagement rests upon the idea that we don't have a credible partner in Afghanistan."

U.N. officials on both sides of the debate say Karzai -- who secured 54.6 percent of the first-round vote -- is ultimately expected to win the election, even without the help of fraudulent votes. But the reports of massive fraud have cast a cloud over Karzai's candidacy in Afghanistan, and Abdullah has stoked those suspicions by accusing Eide of bias toward the president.

On Saturday, Karl W. Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, sought to bolster international support for the U.N.-backed election, telling a gathering of two dozen diplomats that the United States has full trust in Eide. "The U.S. Embassy has full confidence in UNAMA and its leadership," said Caitlin Hayden, a U.S. Embassy spokeswoman.

Edmond Mulet, the U.N. assistant secretary general for peacekeeping, also defended the envoy. "Kai has the full support of the secretary general and of the most important stakeholders, the member states, including the United States, and all the ambassadors and special envoys sitting in Kabul," he said.

But Galbraith has received backing from some rank-and-file staffers, including one former subordinate who said Galbraith "was highly popular among the staff."

"The environment had become very toxic," said Tracey Brinson, Galbraith's assistant in Kabul, who also plans to leave her job this month. "There is a lot of anger, a lot of resentment, sort of hurt feelings, and people are a little disillusioned about what they are doing."

Partlow reported from Kabul.

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• Third of Afghan votes 'fraudulent' (guardian.co.uk)

Peter W. Galbraith -- U.N. Isn't Addressing Fraud in Afghan Election - washingtonpost.com

By Peter W. Galbraith
Sunday, October 4, 2009

Before firing me last week from my post as his deputy special representative in Afghanistan, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon conveyed one last instruction: Do not talk to the press. In effect, I was being told to remain a team player after being thrown off the team. Nonetheless, I agreed.

As my differences with my boss, Norwegian diplomat Kai Eide, had already been well publicized (through no fault of either of us), I asked only that the statement announcing my dismissal reflect the real reasons. Alain LeRoy, the head of U.N. peacekeeping and my immediate superior in New York, proposed that the United Nations say I was being recalled over a "disagreement as to how the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) would respond to electoral fraud." Although this was not entirely accurate -- the dispute was really about whether the U.N. mission would respond to the massive electoral fraud -- I agreed.

Instead, the United Nations announced my recall as occurring "in the best interests of the mission," and U.N. press officials told reporters on background that my firing was necessitated by a "personality clash" with Eide, a friend of 15 years who had introduced me to my future wife.

I might have tolerated even this last act of dishonesty in a dispute dating back many months if the stakes were not so high. For weeks, Eide had been denying or playing down the fraud in Afghanistan's recent presidential election, telling me he was concerned that even discussing the fraud might inflame tensions in the country. But in my view, the fraud was a fact that the United Nations had to acknowledge or risk losing its credibility with the many Afghans who did not support President Hamid Karzai.

I also felt loyal to my U.N. colleagues who worked in a dangerous environment to help Afghans hold honest elections -- at least five of whom have now told me they are leaving jobs they love in disgust over the events leading to my firing.

Afghanistan's presidential election, held Aug. 20, should have been a milestone in the country's transition from 30 years of war to stability and democracy. Instead, it was just the opposite. As many as 30 percent of Karzai's votes were fraudulent, and lesser fraud was committed on behalf of other candidates. In several provinces, including Kandahar, four to 10 times as many votes were recorded as voters actually cast. The fraud has handed the Taliban its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United States and its Afghan partners.

The election was a foreseeable train wreck. Unlike the United Nations-run elections in 2004, this balloting was managed by Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission (IEC). Despite its name, the commission is subservient to Karzai, who appointed its seven members. Even so, the international role was extensive. The United States and other Western nations paid the more than $300 million to hold the vote, and U.N. technical staff took the lead in organizing much of the process, including printing ballot papers, distributing election materials and designing safeguards against fraud.

Part of my job was to supervise all this U.N. support. In July, I learned that at least 1,500 polling centers (out of 7,000) were to be located in places so insecure that no one from the IEC, the Afghan National Army or the Afghan National Police had ever visited them. Clearly, these polling centers would not open on Election Day. At a minimum, their existence on the books would create large-scale confusion, but I was more concerned about the risk of fraud.

Local commission staff members were hardly experienced election professionals; in many instances they were simply agents of the local power brokers, usually aligned with Karzai. If no independent observers or candidate representatives, let alone voters, could even visit the listed location of a polling center, these IEC staffers could easily stuff ballot boxes without ever taking them to the assigned location. Or they could simply report results without any votes being in the ballot boxes.

Along with ambassadors from the United States and key allies, I met with the Afghan ministers of defense and the interior as well as the commission's chief election officer. We urged them either to produce a credible plan to secure these polling centers (which the head of the Afghan army had told me was impossible) or to close them down. Not surprisingly, the ministers -- who served a president benefiting from the fraud -- complained that I had even raised the matter. Eide ordered me not to discuss the ghost polling centers any further. On Election Day, these sites produced hundreds of thousands of phony Karzai votes.

At other critical stages in the election process, I was similarly ordered not to pursue the issue of fraud. The U.N. mission set up a 24-hour election center during the voting and in the early stages of the counting. My staff collected evidence on hundreds of cases of fraud around the country and, more important, gathered information on turnout in key southern provinces where few voters showed up but large numbers of votes were being reported. Eide ordered us not to share this data with anyone, including the Electoral Complaints Commission, a U.N.-backed Afghan institution legally mandated to investigate fraud. Naturally, my colleagues wondered why they had taken the risks to collect this evidence if it was not to be used.

In early September, I got word that the IEC was about to abandon its published anti-fraud policies, allowing it to include enough fraudulent votes in the final tally to put Karzai over the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff. After I called the chief electoral officer to urge him to stick with the original guidelines, Karzai issued a formal protest accusing me of foreign interference. My boss sided with Karzai.

Afghanistan is deeply divided ethnically and geographically. Both Karzai and the Taliban are Pashtun, Afghanistan's dominant ethnic group, which makes up about 45 percent of the country's population. Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai's main challenger, is half Pashtun and half Tajik but is politically identified with the Tajiks, who dominate the north and are Afghanistan's second largest ethnic group. If the Tajiks believe that fraud denied their candidate the chance to compete in a second round, they may respond by simply not recognizing the authority of the central government. The north already has de facto autonomy; these elections could add an ethnic fault line to a conflict between the Taliban and the government that to date has largely been a civil war among Pashtuns.

Since my disagreements with Eide went public, Eide and his supporters have argued that the United Nations had no mandate to interfere in the Afghan electoral process. This is not technically correct. The U.N. Security Council directed the U.N. mission to support Afghanistan's electoral institutions in holding a "free, fair and transparent" vote, not a fraudulent one. And with so much at stake -- and with more than 100,000 U.S. and coalition troops deployed in the country -- the international community had an obvious interest in ensuring that Afghanistan's election did not make the situation worse.

President Obama needs a legitimate Afghan partner to make any new strategy for the country work. However, the extensive fraud that took place on Aug. 20 virtually guarantees that a government emerging from the tainted vote will not be credible with many Afghans.

As I write, Afghanistan's Electoral Complaints Commission is auditing 10 percent of the suspect polling boxes. If the audit shows this sample to be fraudulent, the commission will throw out some 3,000 suspect ballot boxes, which could lead to a runoff vote between Karzai and Abdullah. By itself, a runoff is no antidote for Afghanistan's electoral challenges. The widespread problems that allowed for fraud in the first round of voting must be addressed. In particular, all ghost polling stations should be removed from the books ("closed" is not the right word since they never opened), and the election staff that facilitated the fraud must be replaced.

Afghanistan's pro-Karzai election commission will not do this on its own. Fixing those problems will require resolve from the head of the U.N. mission in Afghanistan -- a quality that so far has been lacking.

galbraithvt@gmail.com

Peter W. Galbraith served as deputy special representative of the United Nations in Afghanistan from June until last week.

One in 4 Afghan Ballots Face Check for Fraud - NYTimes.com

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By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and ARCHIE TSE

KABUL, Afghanistan — Nearly one in four votes in last month’s Afghan presidential elections were cast at polling stations now subject to a recount and audit for possible fraud, a huge number that underscores the possibility that President Hamid Karzai could face a runoff, according to an analysis of Afghan national election commission data by The New York Times.

About a third of Mr. Karzai’s 3.1 million votes were cast at polling stations that face a recount and audit of ballot boxes, according to The Times’s analysis of data released by the country’s Independent Election Commission.

The analysis suggests that the magnitude of the fraud review is far greater than what has generally been understood. Last week, election officials said about 10 percent of polling stations would be subject to an examination ordered by the Electoral Complaints Commission, a United Nations-backed organization that is the ultimate arbiter of election results.

But that figure vastly understates the scope of the fraud review, the Times analysis found.

Based on the criteria set by the Electoral Complaints Commission, almost 3,000 of the 23,000 polling stations would be subject to the fraud review. Moreover, those polling stations account for a large proportion of ballots, some 1.35 million of 5.66 million total votes, the analysis showed.

The analysis also shows that slightly more than a quarter-million of Mr. Karzai’s votes came from polling stations where he received exactly 600 ballots and no other candidate received a single vote. Polling stations were generally allocated 600 ballots apiece, though in certain cases they were allowed to borrow ballots from other stations.

All told, Mr. Karzai received nearly a half-million votes from polling stations where at least 100 votes were cast but no other candidate received a single vote.

Mr. Karzai won 54.6 percent of the Aug. 20 vote, according to the preliminary tally. But if his final total falls below 50 percent because votes are thrown out during the review, he will face a runoff election against his most popular challenger, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, who won 27.8 percent of the vote.

Mr. Karzai’s vote count appears to be more vulnerable to the review than that of Mr. Abdullah. Only about one in eight of Mr. Abdullah’s votes were from polling stations subject to the recount and audit, the analysis found.

It is impossible to know how many votes for either candidate will ultimately be discarded or whether a runoff will be called.

One reason that such a high percentage of the total reported ballots will be subject to the fraud review is the large number of votes reported by nonexistent polling places, one Western diplomat said.

“The phantom polling centers had a vastly disproportionate number of votes,” the diplomat said, declining to be identified according to diplomatic protocol.

The official expressed concern that the recount and audit would be conducted not by examining every affected ballot box, but by statistical sampling, in which a representative proportion of the ballots are examined and those results used to extrapolate the total.

“That has the risk of underweighting fraudulent districts, and it could give Karzai a first-round victory that he did not earn,” the diplomat said. “Because of the uncertainties, it’s not a process that can reliably end the political crisis.”

Proponents of sampling say that it can be rigorous and statistically sound, and that it will speed the review so that if a runoff is needed the election could be held before harsh winter weather sets in and prevents another national ballot until spring.

The challenge “is ensuring that the sample size is large enough to eliminate the margin of error, so that the sampling is accurate and reflects the overall will of the people,” while promptly adjudicating disputed ballots, said Aleem Siddique, a United Nations spokesman in Kabul.

The Western governments financing Mr. Karzai’s government and supplying troops to battle the growing insurgency had once hoped that the Aug. 20 presidential election — the nation’s first since 2004 — would showcase improvements in the country’s governance.

But the reports of widespread fraud and ballot-stuffing, international observers say, have instead cost the Afghan government standing with its own citizens and weakened support in NATO countries for the eight-year-old war.

Some United States and European officials say the political crisis is also empowering the Taliban, which in many rural regions are already seen as a more effective and less corrupt local administrator than the official government and security forces.

President Obama, who is weighing whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, said Sunday that the election “did not go as smoothly as I think we would have hoped.”

“There are some serious issues in terms of how the election was conducted in some parts of the country,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Mr. Karzai’s campaign aides, who have said it will be almost impossible for a recount to overturn Mr. Karzai’s lead, have lashed out at critics of the election as biased and irresponsible.

At a news conference last week, Mr. Karzai conceded that some government officials had been “partial” to him and some to other candidates, an apparent acknowledgment that fraud had occurred.

But he blamed foreign news media for exaggerating the fraud and said there was little evidence of widespread irregularities. He urged Western governments to “respect the people’s vote.”

In an interview on Saturday, the top officer of the Afghan election commission, Daoud Ali Najafi, said he did not know the total number of votes from polling stations subject to the recount and audit order by the Electoral Complaint Commission.

Two weeks ago, the commission declared that it had found “clear and convincing evidence of fraud” and ordered a recount and audit of ballot boxes in any polling place that either had 600 or more votes, or had more than 100 votes with 95 percent of the ballots cast for a single candidate.

Asked whether Mr. Karzai could have one million votes subject to the fraud review, Mr. Najafi said, “Maybe.”

Mr. Najafi acknowledged that some voting fraud had occurred, especially in the country’s more dangerous areas. But he said he believed that at some polling stations all 600 votes were legitimately cast for Mr. Karzai or for other candidates.

“It is possible,” he said.

Richard A. Oppel Jr. reported from Kabul, and Archie Tse from New York. Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting from Kabul.

Afghan Election Mess Aiding Taliban's Propaganda - washingtonpost.com

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Electoral Mess Plays Into Propaganda

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, September 21, 2009

KABUL, Sept. 20 -- The big winner in the fraud-ridden, never-ending Afghanistan elections is turning out to be a party not even on the ballot: the Taliban.

A stream of revelations about systematic cheating during last month's vote has given the Taliban fresh ammunition in their propaganda campaign to portray President Hamid Karzai's administration as hopelessly corrupt. Infighting among U.S., U.N. and European diplomats over whether to accept the results with Karzai the winner or force a new round of voting has also fed the Taliban line that the government in Kabul is merely a puppet of foreign powers.

Mohammad Omar, the Taliban's reclusive leader, broke his silence Saturday to denounce "the so-called elections which were fraught with fraud and lies and which were categorically rejected by the people."

In a statement released on the Internet to mark the end of Ramadan, Omar also railed against what he called "the rampant corruption in the surrogate Kabul administration, the embezzlement, drug trafficking, the existence of mafia networks, the tyranny and high-handedness of the warlords," according to a translation by the NEFA Foundation, a terrorism research group.

The problem for the Afghan government and its chief benefactor, the Obama administration, is that the Taliban's rhetoric has been echoed in recent days by U.S. and European officials, as well as some Afghan leaders, who have characterized the Aug. 20 election as a debacle and Karzai's government as inept.

"They are benefiting enormously from all this," said Haroun Mir, a political analyst and director of Afghanistan's Center for Research and Policy Studies in Kabul.

"The credibility of this election has already been highly undermined, both by the opposition and by the international community itself," he added. "Now people have lost their trust, not only with the Afghan government, but also in the NATO forces."

Taliban leaders first tried to discredit the elections by intimidating voters to stay away from the polls. It largely worked: Only 39 percent of registered voters turned out, compared to 70 percent in the 2004 Afghan elections. But self-inflicted wounds by Karzai's government in counting and policing the vote have done at least as much damage, according to diplomats and analysts in Kabul.

Public Concern

On the streets of the capital, Afghans said they were increasingly worried that the Taliban -- whose forces now control more territory than at any point since they were toppled in 2001 -- would attract more support from Afghans angry with the weak performance of the central government.

"Every day they make more propaganda against the government. This election has been a gold mine for them," said Abdul Sawad Nawabi, a 52-year-old money changer, who opposes the Taliban. "People are very concerned. It is obvious that when the government is dealing with its own problems, it just benefits the enemy."

Ghulam Abbas, 34, a clerk at a menswear store in central Kabul, said ordinary Afghans favor democracy but do not understand how an election monitored by tens of thousands of international troops and observers could have been bungled so badly.

"In every other country, the results are known in three days, five days, at least a month. It shows the weakness of our government that they still can't show a final result. And we don't know the reason. Was it too much fraud? Or something else?"

Last week, Afghan election officials released preliminary results showing Karzai with 54.6 percent of the vote, compared to 27.8 percent for his chief rival, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah.

But the U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission is conducting an investigation into reports of fraud at several thousand precincts and has also ordered a recount of 10 percent of the ballots. Karzai must receive more than 50 percent of the final, certified vote to avoid a runoff.

Karzai supporters blamed the international media and foreign diplomats for exaggerating reports of fraud at the polls. They said the incumbent president will be declared the winner eventually, but worried that the uncertainty could endure for weeks or months.

"All the discussion about the fraud and the pressure will not help anyone, and it will only give the insurgents more opportunities," said Halim Fidai, the governor of Wardak province, just to the southwest of Kabul. "The longer this goes on, the more the enemy will try to exploit the situation."

Khalid Pashtun, a member of the Afghan parliament from Kandahar, said a dragged-out recount would only weaken the standing of the central government

"That's what we are trying to tell the commission: Please don't push this issue too much because the Taliban will just take advantage," he said. "They will constantly tell people that this is not a legitimate government."

More Work for NATO

Afghan officials said the investigations and recounts are also undermining attempts by U.S. and NATO commanders to persuade Taliban commanders and fighters to switch sides.

British Lt. Gen. Graeme Lamb, who is in charge of a NATO program to reach out to those fighting alongside the Taliban but not considered die-hard followers of the movement, said last week that many of the insurgents were "guns for hire."

"You can buy an insurgency if you have enough money," he told the Independent, a British newspaper. "It's a case of changing people's minds, changing people's perceptions.

But several Afghan officials and analysts said such an approach was doomed as long as insurgents sensed that the Afghan central government was in trouble and that NATO was losing its stomach for the war, now in it's eighth year.

"These Taliban are getting more and more powerful, so it's harder and harder to get them to come to the table," said Arsala Rahmani, a former Taliban deputy minister who now serves in the Afghan Parliament. "They have better weapons than ever and they think they are stronger than the 40 countries that are fighting against them."

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Many Women Stayed Away From the Polls In Afghanistan - washingtonpost.com

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By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 31, 2009

KABUL, Aug. 30 -- Five years ago, with the country at peace, traditional taboos easing and Western donors pushing for women to participate in democracy, millions of Afghan women eagerly registered and then voted for a presidential candidate. In a few districts, female turnout was even higher than male turnout.

But on Aug. 20, when Afghans again went to the polls to choose a president, that heady season of political emancipation seemed long gone. This time, election monitors and women's activists said, a combination of fear, tradition, apathy and poor planning conspired to deprive many Afghan women of rights they had only recently begun to exercise.

With insurgents threatening to attack polling places and voters, especially in the rural south, many families kept their women home on election day, even if the men ventured out to vote. In cities, some segregated female polling rooms were nearly empty, and many educated women who had voted or even worked at polling stations in previous elections decided not to risk going out this time.

"Everywhere I went before elections, I urged women in the villages to vote. But when the day came, even professional women in the city who normally felt free to go to work and shops and weddings stayed home. I was shocked," said Safia Siddiqui, a legislator from Nangahar province. "There has been a lot of talk about women's civic life and political movements, but security comes first."

Although no official turnout figures are available and the election results are not yet final, election monitoring groups and political activists from Taliban-plagued provinces report that in dozens of insecure districts, almost no women voted. Nationwide, they say, women's participation was much lower than in either the 2004 presidential or 2005 parliamentary elections.

The sense of eroding political rights for women did not begin with this election. In the past several years, Taliban attacks on prominent women have sent a powerful message to others who dreamed of entering public life. In the southern province of Kandahar alone, a female legislator, a women's affairs official and a female prosecutor were gunned down by terrorists. Others have received constant threats, travel with armed guards or rarely visit their constituencies.

When rural women did vote in this election, it was often by proxy, which lent itself to fraud, monitoring groups report. Monitors and others said that across the south, women's voter registration cards, which often had no photographs because of conservative taboos on women's faces being seen, were taken to the polls in batches by male relatives or tribal elders.

In some cases, they said, those same cards were used by officials or partisans to stuff ballot boxes, either for President Hamid Karzai or his top challenger, ex-foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, as well as for candidates for provincial council seats. With about one-third of the vote counted, Karzai now leads Abdullah 46.2 percent to 31.4, leaving both short of the 50 percent-plus-one-vote needed to avoid a runoff.

"Our constitution gives all men and women equal rights to vote, but in most areas that were not safe and secure, men did not let the women leave home and voted for them," said Sabrina Saghib, a member of a parliamentary committee on women's rights. "That is against the law and those votes should not be counted as women's votes."

Abdullah and Karzai have accused each other's camps of widespread election fraud. More than 2,000 complaints of fraud have been sent to the internationally led Electoral Complaints Commission, reportedly including some that describe the use of women's voting cards for ballot-box stuffing. The commission has not released any details, and it could take weeks to finish investigating the most serious claims.

A contributing factor in the low female turnout was that in many insecure areas, not enough women were willing to work at the polls as monitors or staff, so men were sent instead. That meant many families would not allow their female members to vote at those sites.

Accounts of low participation by women came from female activists and politicians in Kabul and a dozen provinces. Some described voting in short lines and empty rooms, or said they were unable to vote because of Taliban threats. Some tried to encourage local women to vote but found them afraid, confused and subject to strong family pressure to stay home.

Sahira Sharif, a women's rights activist from the southeastern province of Khost, said that in 2004 and 2005 she traveled freely across the province, talking to women about the importance of voting. This time, she said, she received support from the International Republican Institute to undertake a similar campaign but had to arrange her meetings in secret to avoid detection by the Taliban.

"It made me sad to see how far backward things have gone for women in my province in just a few years," Sharif said, adding that long distances from villages to polling stations made it especially risky for women to vote. In an ironic twist on the abuse of women's voting cards, she also said that a female candidate for Khost's provincial council took several thousand unused cards and stuffed ballot boxes for herself.

Shahazad Akbar, a staff member of the Free and Fair Election Foundation in Kabul, said her mother, a teacher, had worked as a polling official in the last election but was too fearful even to go to the polls this time. Akbar's sister knocked on doors as a campaign worker and found that most women had little idea about the election. Akbar toured several polling places in the capital and found almost no women there.

"Women feel special pressures in our society," she said. "Even in areas where you'd think women would face less obstacles, they could not get permission to go because of insecurity." In Kandahar, she said, female election observers from her organization did not tell their friends or neighbors what they were doing.

Many urban women who did go to the polls expressed a strong sense of defiance, saying they were determined not to be cowed by Taliban threats to cut off their ink-dipped fingers. But others said they were fed up with national leadership and saw no point in risking physical harm to participate.

"I voted for Mr. Karzai last time. We were all so excited then, and we thought peace would come. But now things have gotten much worse, and I decided not to vote at all," said Shuqufa, 38, a mother of five in Karte Nau, a Kabul district where suicide bombers and gunmen attacked the police station on election day. "These political leaders bring us nothing but fighting and rockets. We are fed up with the Taliban, and we are fed up with them."

The major candidates did little to appeal to the women's vote, campaigning without their wives in deference to conservative traditions. At the last moment, Abdullah and Karzai brought their wives out to vote with them, but the gesture seemed like a belated photo opportunity. Abdullah's wife was the only female voter in her polling room.

Some rights activists said the election-day chill signified a wider, continuing setback for Afghan women's role in social, political and economic life after a brief period of hope for change after the Taliban regime was ousted in late 2001. They noted that domestic violence against women is increasing, that the Taliban has attacked and shut down hundreds of girls' schools and that most women remain economically in thrall to their fathers and husbands, even when they are abused.

"Things are reverting, and it's because of a mix of insecurity, economy and culture," said Soraya Sobrang, a physician and member of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. "For a few years when security was better, women could participate in public life and the new constitution gave them political rights. But then the attacks started, and people were warned not to send their daughters to school, not to send their wives to work. All their new rights came under threat, and nothing really changed in their lives."

Now, Sobrang said, many Afghan women have lost hope.

"We have lost a lot of the ground we made. Women still face forced marriages, still work in the fields, still depend on men who beat them every day," said Sobrang, who voted on Aug. 20 in a very short line of nervous, unsmiling women. "We can give a card to a woman and tell her to vote, but that does not protect her from danger, and it does not give her any real rights at all."

Accusations Of Vote Fraud Multiply in Afghanistan - washingtonpost.com

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By Joshua Partlow and Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, August 28, 2009

MAZAR-E SHARIF, Afghanistan -- One week after Afghanistan's presidential election, with the winner still undeclared, increasing accusations of fraud and voter coercion threaten to undermine the validity of the results, deepen dangerous regional divisions and hamper the Obama administration's goals in this volatile country.

With U.S. popular support for the war in Afghanistan wavering, an election viewed as illegitimate by many Afghans would be a major setback for President Obama, who has increased U.S. military and economic efforts in a conflict central to his foreign policy. Officials worry that a Kabul government tainted by allegations of election-stealing or destabilized by a potentially violent backlash could derail U.S. efforts to beat back a resurgent Taliban and build Afghan security forces.

In interviews here in the capital of Balkh province in northern Afghanistan, the governor, election officials and residents described incidents of ballot-box stuffing and voter intimidation, particularly by election monitors. The many allegations of fraud add to the chorus of doubts from candidates and observers in other parts of the country about the fairness of the election process.

In a jailhouse interview, election monitor Abdul Hakim Ghafurzai, bruised and bloodied and slumped in his cell, said he knows how it feels to challenge election fraud in Afghanistan. "I am in pain," said Ghafurzai, who alleged he was beaten and arrested after complaining that police outside this northern city shut down polling places because people were voting for President Hamid Karzai.

"Fraud has taken place by the Independent Election Commission, and there were also many threats," said Atta Mohammad Noor, the governor of Balkh, who broke with Karzai before the election and backed his main rival, Abdullah Abdullah, who is very popular in the north. "If this government wins through fraud, I won't be with this government."

All five leading candidates have filed complaints of ballot-box stuffing or destruction, intimidation and pressure on voters at polling stations, and ballots cast by phantom voters. One candidate, former anti-drug official Mirwais Yasini, personally delivered boxes full of shredded ballots to the foreign-led Election Complaints Commission. Yasini and five other candidates issued a joint statement this week saying the election was marred by "widespread fraud and intimidation" that threatened to "increase tension and violence in the country."

Because the complaint process is slow and cumbersome, officials at the complaints commission office in Kabul said they do not expect to finish their investigations until mid-September, at least two weeks after the official election results are announced. That could create public tension and possible unrest, especially if Karzai is announced as the winner before the numerous complaints have been resolved.

Karzai and Abdullah have denied allegations that their followers committed systematic fraud.

In the past week, Abdullah has held two news conferences to allege "widespread rigging" by the Karzai administration, its campaign aides and employees of the Independent Election Commission. He has shown reporters thick blocks of ballots with identical check marks next to Karzai's name and photograph, and shown videos of people sitting on the floor in closed polling stations and systematically marking ballot after ballot.

Legislators and other leaders in a number of provinces, especially those threatened by insurgent violence such as Kandahar, Khost and Wardak, have complained that at polling stations where very few people were able to vote because of insecurity, sealed ballot boxes inexplicably full of hundreds of ballots were sent to Kabul.

Election observers have described northern Afghanistan as a place where the election proceeded relatively peacefully, with as many as half of registered voters going to the polls -- far more than in some Taliban strongholds in the south. But interviews with those monitoring the election here and looking into allegations of irregularities painted a bleaker portrait that implicated the followers of both Karzai and Abdullah.

"I was a witness to fraud, and I couldn't do anything to stop it," said a female election monitor at a voting site in Barga village, in this province, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. She said her fellow staff members voted at least 100 times for Abdullah and forced other residents to make the same choice. "I was really upset. The voting system was not good. People didn't have the right to choose," she said.

At least one polling center was set ablaze, destroying all records, and an election supervisor was gunned down while driving with boxes of ballots, said the top provincial election official, Dur Mohammad.

"Some candidates bought off the election officials. I think there were several cases," said Mahgul Yamam, the head of the Election Complaints Commission in Balkh. "The system is not great in Afghanistan."

In a jailhouse interview, Ghafurzai, 47, the top election monitor in the Chimtal district outside Mazar-e Sharif, said he received a phone call about 3:30 p.m. on election day that police were shutting down polling centers in his district because too many people were voting for Karzai.

"Police interfered with the counting. They didn't let people vote; they locked the boxes," he said.

Ghafurzai said that he alerted his provincial superiors about the problem, and that the next day, while counting votes at the Wali Asr High School, he was visited by the local police commander and three of his guards.

The guards "punched me and kicked me," he said, showing his bruised arms and back and blood-speckled scarf. "I said, 'Why are you arresting me? You have no documents.' They didn't say anything. They just handcuffed me and took me away."

Ghafurzai is accused of assaulting the police commander, a charge he denies. Noor, the governor, described the matter as unrelated to politics and as a personal dispute between the police commander and the official, but he said he had formed a team to investigate the incident. Noor said Abdullah won 3,988 votes in the Chimtal district, compared with 2,287 for Karzai.

One tribal elder from Chimtal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Abdullah supporters collected registration cards from poor villagers and cast votes themselves. He said these supporters offered food -- taken from Red Crescent aid supplies delivered to the area this year after a flood -- in exchange for the voting cards.

"I am the elder of the tribe. People share their problems with me. I know this was going on," he said.

Palwa Shah, a 20-year-old university student, said that the polling site she attended was decorated with posters of Abdullah and that the election staff members and police there told people to vote for him.

"That voting center was not free. People could not choose their own candidate. They were being forced; they were not happy," said Shah, who voted in the Dehdadi district of Balkh. "They said, 'If you don't vote for Abdullah, the security situation could get worse, and you won't be able to live here anymore.' "

At the Election Complaints Commission office in Kabul this week, teams of workers began sorting through thousands of brown envelopes filled with complaint forms. More than 80 percent were blank, officials said, suggesting that there were few problems with fraud or, more likely, that many people were reluctant to file complaints for fear of retaliation or because they were illiterate. Few forms have been received from the southern regions, where fraud is generally thought to have been the most widespread.

"One reason so few forms were filled in may be because people didn't trust them," said Nellika Little, a public information official at the commission. "They do have to be in writing. If someone is being intimidated at a polling station, are they really going to complain to the officials there?"

Little said the commission had received nearly 1,500 formal complaints, including 150 that it considers potentially serious enough to affect the result of the election. Those 150 cases are being investigated by teams of professionals, including some who are traveling to the districts where they originated to question witnesses and officials.

Commission officials said many complaints would be difficult to investigate because they are vague and contain little or no evidence.

"I'm really worried about the result of the election. All the candidates are complaining, and they are feeling there were many problems," said Farid Muttaqi, a human rights worker in Mazar-e Sharif. "For sure the people will not cooperate with the government or feel they are a part of this government. And this could give a chance for the Taliban to come and do their work here."

Constable reported from Kabul.