UN-backed panel denounces fraud in Afghan election

[Antid Oto]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

UN-backed panel denounces fraud in Afghan election
By Tom Eley
9 September 2009

An international oversight board has ordered an extensive recount of
ballots in Afghanistan’s August 20 presidential elections. The
announcement comes as ongoing vote-counting has moved Hamid Karzai
beyond the 50 percent threshold that would avert a run-off election
with his main rival, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah.

In recent days, voices supporting the US-led military occupation of
Afghanistan, led by the New York Times, have seized on widespread
evidence of electoral fraud to push for the sidelining or removal of
Karzai, the longtime US puppet who has fallen from favor with the
American military and the Obama administration.

On Tuesday, the Electoral Complaints Commission, a panel whose
majority was appointed by the United Nations, called for a systematic
recount in response to what it characterized as “clear and convincing
evidence of fraud.” The commission announced it has fielded over 2,000
fraud charges, of which it says 720 are sufficiently substantial to
affect the outcome of the election.

The Electoral Complaints Commission—which consists of a US, Canadian
and Dutch representative in addition to two Afghanis—has ordered the
Afghan election commission to recount votes at every polling station
where more than 100 percent of the voting population cast ballots, or
where more than 95 percent of all votes were cast for only one candidate.

According to the Afghan electoral commission, which is controlled by
Karzai, counted ballots from over 91 percent of precincts show Karzai
with 54 percent of the vote. The commission reported that Karzai has
2.9 million votes out of 5.4 million cast, with Abudllah a distant
second, with 1.5 million votes. All the other candidates combine for
slightly fewer than one million votes. The turnout, according to the
commission, was a mere 30 to 35 percent of eligible voters.

Whether or not the recount could result in a run-off election by
reducing Karzai’s vote total to less than 50 percent is unclear. The
Electoral Complaints Commission is vested with the power to nullify
the entire election.

Daoud Ali Najafi, Afghanistan’s chief election official, said the
recount could take two or three months. Other Afghan election
officials said they have received conflicting orders on how to carry
out the recount.

A Karzai spokesman said that whatever the results of the recount, it
would not be enough to reverse the election results. “We have enough
of a lead,” said Waheed Omer. “We don’t think the fraud is so
widespread to make a major difference.”

The US State Department offered an opposing assessment, with spokesman
Ian Kelly at a Tuesday news briefing putting Karzai on notice that the
Obama adminstration views the recount as the decisive phase of the
election. “The results of these elections need to be credible and need
to reflect the will of the Afghan people,” Kelly said. “And as a
result, we need to have a rigorous vetting of all of these allegations
of fraud.”

Another State Department official told Afghan offiicals to “cool it”
in regard to announcing further election results until “you’re sure
that everybody has confidence in them,” Voice of America News reported
on Tuesday.

An anonymous UN official also declared that Karzai had not yet won and
indicated that the results could be overturned. “At this point nobody
is a winner,” the official told the Washington Post. “It is too soon
for anyone to start having parties.”

A chorus of western officials, speaking on condition of anonymity with
major US media sources, adopted strong language to condemn the Afghan
electoral process on Monday and Tuesday.

ABC News reported that “a US official and two Western officials in
Kabul” charged Afghanistan’s election commission with “crossing a red
line” by “knowingly” counting fraudulent votes. “That reversal, the
Western officials said, came after the commission was ‘threatened,’”
ABC reported.

The Associated Press and Washington Post cited Western officials who
claimed tallies arrived from hundreds of precincts in the south that
either did not exist or were closed on election day. An official told
the Associated Press that the majority of ballots from three southern
provinces that voted heavily for Karzai—Kandahar, Paktika and
Khost—are fraudulent.

The New York Times went further. It reported officials claiming “that
in some provinces, the pro-Karzai ballots may exceed the people who
actually voted by a factor of 10.”

The Times also reported unnamed diplomats accusing Afghan election
officials of altering a computer program for vote-counting in order to
ensure Karzai would surpass 50 percent of the vote. “He was below 50
per cent when you exclude the obviously fraudulent votes,” one
official told the Times.

It was the Times that on August 29 laid down the outlines of the media
campaign against Karzai in an analysis by lead Afghanistan
correspondent Dexter Filkins (“Seven Days that Shook Afghanistan”). To
that point, the official US position had been that the elections,
while problematic in certain respects, represented the “democratic
will” of the Afghan people and a “watershed” in their self-rule.

In his column, Filkins warned that “reports of cheating were so
numerous, and so substantive, that they could seriously undermine any
claims to legitimacy by the eventual winner, whoever it is.” As he
made clear, Filkins was referring to Karzai.

“The allegations of vote-rigging brought into focus the extremely
difficult position that the Americans face in Afghanistan, and in
particular, with Mr. Karzai,” Filkins wrote. “Mr. Karzai has come to
preside over a corrupt administration, a deteriorating war, and his
country’s transformation into the largest producer of opium in the world.”

This would endanger the Obama administration’s military surge. “The
situation on the battlefield is difficult on its own,” Filkins warned.
“But it is, of course, inevitably bound up with the political
stalemate in Kabul.”

The US posture of shock and anger over rampant electoral fraud is
entirely cynical and self-serving. Washington hoped that the election
would provide a cloak of legitimacy and “democracy” for its
increasingly bloody drive to wipe out growing popular resistance to
the US colonial-style occupation. In the face of the election debacle,
it is now seeking to utilize election fraud as a pretext for
sidelining Karzai and replacing him with a new puppet regime in order
to better prosecute its war against the Afghan people.

Karzai is aware that the media campaign, which is clearly being
carried out in conjunction with a number of high-ranking US and
Western officials, is placing his position in peril. In a recent
interview with France’s Le Figaro, Karzai singled out the US and
British media. “These journalists seek to delegitimize the future
Afghan government,” Karzai said.

The incumbent president, who was installed by the US in 2002 following
its invasion of Afghanistan, has retained power by forming alliances
with war lords who back the US occupation, and who is despised by the
Afghan population as a corrupt puppet, is seeking to portray himself
as defending Afghan sovereignty against pressure from the US and its
NATO allies.

While the election was undoubtedly characterized by virtually every
form of electoral fraud, these arose inevitably from a more
fundamental source—that the election was carried out under conditions
of military occupation and a neo-colonial counter-insurgency campaign.
No candidates opposed to foreign occupation were allowed to participate.

The original pretext for the war—to capture Osama bin Laden and other
Al Qaeda leaders charged with the September 11 terrorist attacks—has
long been abandoned, and the Obama administration has downplayed the
Bush administration’s attempt to justify the war as an exercise in
spreading democracy.

What remains is a dirty colonial war aimed at establishing US
dominance over a country that occupies a critical geo-strategic
position in oil- and gas-rich Central Asia.

The Taliban has continued to gain strength, despite Obama’s military
“surge,” in large part because of growing popular opposition to both
the US-NATO occupation and its puppet regime in Kabul.

The Karzai regime has overseen and profited from the military
operation. But it now appears that Karzai has outlived his usefulness.

In an indication of his increasingly tenuous position, ABC News has
reported that US ambassador Karl Eikenberry called Karzai in for a
meeting late on Monday to express concerns over the government’s role
in the manipulation of the election results.

Meanwhile, attacks on occupation forces continued this week. On
Tuesday, four US soldiers were killed in eastern Afghanistan’s Kunar
province, the US military announced. Since August 1, 65 US soldiers
have died. This year has been the deadliest for US and NATO forces
since the war began. At least 324 occupation personnel have been
killed, 190 of them American.

Also on Tuesday, the NATO wing of the Kabul International airport was
attacked by a suicide bomber, killing three and wounding at least six
others. Among the wounded were US and Belgian civilians. The attack
took place near a heavily guarded gate of the airport, which is used
as a conduit for NATO occupation troops. The Taliban claimed
responsibility for the bombing.

And, in a reminder that the war in Iraq is far from over, four US
soldiers died in Iraq on Tuesday, in separate roadside bomb attacks in
Baghdad and northern Iraq.

Last week’s US bombing of ditched oil tankers near Kunduz, carried out
at the behest of German troops, killed scores of civilians,
underscoring the reality behind the official talk of “protecting” the
Afghan people from the Taliban. The criminal character of the war was
further exposed on Monday, when a Swedish aid agency revealed that US
soldiers stormed a hospital it operates in east-central Afghanistan.
The soldiers broke down doors and tied up hospital staff, the agency
said. Soldiers demanded that the hospital inform them if those seeking
treatment are insurgents, so they could deny them medical treatment.

A spokesman for the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, Anders Fange,
called the raid “a clear violation of globally recognized humanitarian
principles about the sanctity of health facilities and staff in areas
of conflict.”

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/sep2009/afgh-s09.shtml

**********
Dit bericht is verzonden via de informele D66 discussielijst (D66 at nic.surfnet.nl).
Aanmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SUBSCRIBE D66 uwvoornaam uwachternaam
Afmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SIGNOFF D66
Het on-line archief is te vinden op: http://listserv.surfnet.nl/archives/d66.html
**********