[the good news for Obama is that he can say "my generals have said again and again that without a democratically-representative government in Kabul, a war there is futile. So we're pulling out all of our troops as soon as we can." Of course, this isn't going to happen. Instead, my guess is that the US will likely "broker" a deal between Karzai and A2, forming an emergency government. Then more troops will go in....]
from today's NYT: >>October 20, 2009 Audit Pushes Karzai Below 50 Percent in Afghan Vote By SABRINA TAVERNISE KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghanistan’s political crisis deepened on Monday, with President Hamid Karzai hesitating to accept an international audit that stripped him of nearly a million votes, requiring a runoff with his top challenger. A panel of United Nations-appointed experts issued findings for the first time on Monday showing that the fraud was so pervasive that Mr. Karzai had not won the Aug. 20 election outright, according to foreign and Afghan officials in the capital, Kabul. The findings are a defining moment for Mr. Karzai, who initially received 54 percent of the vote, and believes he is the rightful winner. They place him in direct conflict with his main backer, the United States, and threaten to pitch the country into a major constitutional crisis, should he decide to reject them altogether. The Obama administration registered its concern. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, a top Obama ally and the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, made an unplanned stop in Kabul on Monday night, and met Mr. Karzai in the presidential palace, “to continue his discussions and consultations,” according to a spokeswoman for the American Embassy in Kabul. The special audit committee, the Electoral Complaints Commission, invalidated nearly a third of all ballots cast for Mr. Karzai, according to a New York Times analysis of the preliminary data. More precisely, 28 percent of Mr. Karzai’s 3,093,000 votes were discarded due to fraud, the analysis showed. The result pushed Mr. Karzai’s final vote total to about 49 percent, below the threshold needed to avoid a runoff. An independent analysis by an election monitoring group, Democracy International, gave Mr. Karzai about 48.3 percent, The Associated Press reported. A Western official familiar with the results had predicted that result earlier Monday. The committee also threw out 18 percent of the votes of Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister and Mr. Karzai’s top challenger, leaving him with 31 percent of the total vote, more than the 28 percent he had originally polled. << -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
