Kabul, October 05: Afghan authorities began a sample audit of suspect ballots in the controversial elections on Monday, officials said, as the country inches closer to a final decision on the next president.
Afghans went to the polls on August 20 to elect their president for the next five years, but allegations of widespread fraud — mainly directed against the incumbent Hamid Karzai — have delayed the announcement of a winner.
Karzai leads the preliminary results with around 55 percent of the vote. He needs 50 percent plus one vote to be declared the winner.
His main rival, Abdullah Abdullah, has around 28 percent, and has been at the forefront of vote-rigging accusations against Karzai.
Pivotal to the final outcome is the result of the audit of 3,498 ballot boxes — up from an original 3,063, an official said — that have been returned to Kabul from polling stations across the country for checking.
Ten percent of ballots in those boxes are being examined by Independent Election Commission (IEC) auditors, said the official close to the project, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Results would be extrapolated from the sample.
Auditing was supposed to have begun on Saturday but was delayed, partly due to political wrangling between the two electoral oversight bodies and the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), a source at the IEC said.
“It is obvious now that UNAMA has stepped in and is mediating between ECC and IEC,” the IEC source said.
The audit is expected to take two days, other sources close to the process said.
Once the check is complete, both the IEC and ECC must fulfil other formalities before a final result can be declared — which a senior Western official involved in the process said could be early next week.
The fraud accusations that have dogged the Afghan vote have dismayed leaders of the international community, which has supported and bankrolled the process as a step forward on Afghanistan’s road to democracy.
The situation was compounded last week when Peter Galbraith, former deputy to the UN’s special envoy to Afghanistan, was sacked over disagreements with his boss, Kai Eide, over how to deal with the fraud.
Galbraith later said Eide had been biased in favour of Karzai.
In Sunday’s Washington Post, Galbraith wrote: “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,” he said.
Orzala Ashraf, an independent analyst affiliated with the Dutch NGO Inter-church Organisation for Development Cooperation, said the delay in the results has paralysed Afghanistan politically, economically and militarily.
“The legitimacy of the new government is very important, not only on a national level for Afghans but for Afghanistan’s position in the international community,” she said. Related article: Aid link to progress
“No matter who wins we will still be living with an extremely undesirable and corrupt government that needs fixing.”
As the anniversary approaches of the October 7, 2001, US-led invasion that pushed the Taliban from power, the fight against the insurgency — by more than 100,000 foreign troops under US and NATO command — is intensifying.
This year is the deadliest in the eight-year war, with independent website icasulaties.org, which keeps a running tally, putting troop deaths so far in 2009 at 396, including 238 Americans.
US forces suffered one of their bloodiest days of the war on Saturday when eight soldiers were killed when their remote outposts were overrun by hundreds of Taliban militants.
The commander of foreign forces in the country, US General Stanley McChrystal, is hoping for another 40,000 troops for his new counter-insurgency strategy and to train Afghan security forces to do the job themselves.
—Agencies