[Peace-discuss] Obama Decides Karzai to Stay in Power Despite Fraud

[C. G. Estabrook]

	White House Embraces Fraudulent Win, Calls for 'Reconciliation'
	by Jason Ditz, September 28, 2009

Ending weeks of speculation regarding the massive fraud in Afghanistan’s August 
presidential election, the Obama Administration has formally decided that 
incumbent President Hamid Karzai will get a second five year term, so matter 
what the investigations determine.

The preliminary vote count showed that President Karzai got 54.6% of the vote, 
and chief rival Abdullah Abdullah got only 28%. Election monitors however say 
that as many as a third of Karzai’s votes, amounting to over a million, were 
potentially fraudulent.

The Afghan constitution mandates a run-off vote in the event no one gets 50% of 
the vote, a distinct possibility if Karzai loses hundreds of thousands of fake 
votes. Officials however say such a vote will be virtually impossible because of 
the rapidly approaching winter. US and British officials have spoken out against 
a runoff vote, and a NATO meeting Friday appears to have settled the alliance on 
just eschewing the vote entirely and keeping Karzai in power, consequences be 
damned.

But the reality is that Karzai’s now seemingly formalized “victory,” coming in 
an election whose level of blatant fraud makes Iran’s June vote look like a 
model of responsibility is only going to increase the perception that the nation 
is under international occupation and that Karzai, rhetoric notwithstanding, is 
a figurehead.

That concern seems to have been lost on the Obama Administration, which has been 
crowing about the “success” of the vote for a solid month and seems eager to put 
the messiness of Karzai’s stolen election aside and move on with the 
long-promised “reconciliation” with the Taliban.

http://news.antiwar.com/2009/09/28/obama-decides-karzai-to-stay-in-power-despite-fraud/


	From The Times [UK]
	September 29, 2009
	US accepts Hamid Karzai as Afghan leader despite poll fraud claims
	Giles Whittell in Washington

...The acceptance was conveyed by Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, in a 
meeting with her Afghan counterpart hours before Mr Obama received a formal 
request from General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of Nato forces in 
Afghanistan, for up to 40,000 more troops.

Mrs Clinton told Rangin Dadfar Spanta, the Afghan Foreign Minister, that she and 
her Nato colleagues — including David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary — had 
reached a consensus that Mr Karzai would remain President even if investigations 
now under way cut his share of the first-round vote to below 50 per cent. The 
meeting took place last Friday but details emerged yesterday.

The Administration has also told Kabul that it will support what Mr Karzai calls 
a policy of “reconciliation”, which is intended to induce low and mid-ranking 
Taleban fighters into swapping sides or at least to lay down their arms. The 
same tactic, which boils down to paying fighters to leave the insurgency, is 
central to a new counter-insurgency strategy recommended by General McChrystal 
in a bleak assessment of Afghan security leaked last week to the journalist Bob 
Woodward.

The effort, modelled on the “Sons of Iraq” movement that proved critical to the 
success of the US-led surge in Iraq two years ago, is to be led by the British 
general Sir Graeme Lamb, according to Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the 
Joint Chiefs of Staff...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/Afghanistan/article6853123.ece