The Obama administration, debating whether to send thousands more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, has intensified pressure on Afghan President Hamid Karzai not to declare victory and to agree to a partial recount of votes in an election tainted by massive fraud.
Administration officials said the U.S. ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, pressed Mr. Karzai in meetings Monday and Tuesday to allow the fraud investigation to play out before claiming publicly that he has been re-elected. An Afghan-run election commission said that with more than 90 percent of the votes counted, Mr. Karzai had 54 percent, enough to avoid a runoff.
At the same time, the U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) - an independent body with the power to investigate and nullify fraudulent votes - ordered a recount at hundreds of polling stations where it said it had found “clear and convincing evidence of fraud” during the Aug. 20 election.
With the Karzai government already losing popularity because of allegations of corruption and mismanagement, a tainted election could make it harder for Washington to justify sending more troops to Afghanistan and undercut the U.S.-led mission to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda.
The Obama administration is considering sending up to 20,000 more U.S. troops to augment the 68,000 that will be there by year’s end.
“We are in a post-democratic Afghanistan,” said Gilles Dorronsoro, an Afghan specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The latest elections, he said, were far less credible than presidential voting in 2004.
“It’s not going to be a legitimate government because the turnout was very low and we know there was huge fraud,” Mr. Dorronsoro said. “Nobody is trusting the Afghan political system.”
Stephen Biddle, a military specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations who took part in a reassessment of Afghanistan strategy earlier this year, said the Obama administration “needs to make a case to the American public that we have our own interests over there. This [U.S. intervention] is not an act of charity.”
Still, with U.S. casualties at a record high, public support for military intervention is dropping eight years after the U.S. toppled the Taliban regime in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
State Department spokesman Ian C. Kelly told reporters that the U.S. is “calling on all the candidates, we are calling on all the different actors out there, political institutions, to show patience” and refrain from announcing official results and declaring victory.
“We need to have a rigorous vetting of all of these allegations of fraud, and a legitimate electoral process is vital to us, and vital to any kind of partnership that we would have with the government going forward,” he said. “Of course we have a stake in this too. We have committed American servicemen and women to the job out there, to supporting the Afghan government. We’ve committed U.S. taxpayer money.”
Although officially certified results are due by late September, Mr. Kelly said, the process of investigating election fraud could take months.
More than 720 major fraud charges have been lodged with the ECC, which has quarantined ballots from more than 600 polling stations where fraud was suspected. The results announced Tuesday do not include those ballots, chief electoral officer Daoud Ali Najafi told reporters in Kabul.
However, Western diplomats and election observers have suggested that there were many more votes that should not be counted. They have cited hundreds of apparently fake voting sites, especially in southern Afghanistan - an ethnic Pushtun area already likely to support the Pushtun incumbent president - which turned in more ballots than the number of registered voters. In many cases, the ballots were not folded - an indication that they were never put into ballot boxes.
“In some areas, the turnout was higher than the number of ballots we sent to the polling station,” Mr. Najafi said.
Grant Kippen, the Canadian chairman of the ECC, whose other members include an American, a Dutch citizen and two Afghans, said he saw a box with 1,700 ballots in the southern city of Kandahar, even though the maximum should be 600.
Analysts said the election aftermath is certain to add to the problems of the NATO-led international security forces in Afghanistan.
“One needs a credible political leadership in Kabul, one that has legitimacy in the eyes of the Afghan people. This would be a cornerstone of any successful counterinsurgency strategy,” said Hardin Lang, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who was an election observer in Kandahar.
Both Mr. Karzai and his main challenger, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, declared initial victory the day after the election, but the fact that Mr. Karzai has not repeated that assertion since the results were announced is a “positive sign, though the jury is still out,” Mr. Lang said.
Kenneth Katzman, an Afghanistan specialist for the Congressional Research Service, predicted that the Afghan government will call a loya jirga - or tribal meeting - of major factions and politicians to try to resolve the election dispute, even if Mr. Karzai can show that he received more than 50 percent of the votes.
“This is a mechanism that has wide legitimacy in Afghanistan,” Mr. Katzman said, adding that, if Mr. Abdullah attends, he can expect to be rewarded with some Cabinet seats, provincial governorships and other consolation prizes for failing to oust the president.
Barbara Slavin contributed to this report.
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