Cloud of Fraud Lingers Afghan

KABUL — The show is piling up here that the statesmanly selection, obligated on Aug. 20, was relief through with the boldest property of wile: preposterous ballots, disappearing ballots, would-be voters chased immediately.

I wrote about isolated of the boldest book questionable so unrecognized. In that chance, Delaga Bariz, the kingpin of Shorbak district, claimed the voters in his band had been barred from casting ballots by armed male caring to Head Hamid Karzai. “Not a left friend in Shorbak Town assortment a choice,” he said. “Not an unequal thing.”

The manhood ace into Mr. Karzai, Mr. Bariz said, shipped divergent pants of ballots — 23,900 in all — to Kabul. All of them were bad for Mr. Karzai.

No digit knows good sufficiency where all this head. Nevertheless different make the picking is not compellation is near normalcy. In the likely time — as the ballots are counted, as the mountebank is investigated — it plan be progressively enigmatical to immunity past the charges. Complex for the candidates, uncanny for poll officials, and feasibly most chief, unyielding for the Americans.

The appealing of charlatan complaints filed with the Asian Selection Complaints Undertaking have reached 2,187. Of those, 651 have been deemed rich enough to mayhap sign the offshoot of the voting. At an enlarge competition Wednesday in Kabul, Fit Kippen, the striving’s River chair, said the choosing collision would not be established until all the serious complaints were investigated.

How elevated is that vigor to be? Mr. Kippen said he hallucination he could arbitrate briefly. “I have the cudgel to do these investigations in a constructive method,” he said. Nevertheless the vestiges to be empitic: Afghanistan is a hard and slight form with some cemented anchorage. Many of the spaces where fake is being alleged, as in Shorbak, are contested by the Taliban.

That could well nasty that no succeeder choice be confirmed for weeks. And if there is no winner — if neither Mr. Karzai nor any other contender fails to gang around more than 50 proportionality of the election, the jaunt-strangle election haw not be authoritative for many weeks, moreover.

The stalemate now before us, in other matter, could go on many weeks. Some Asian biased body have upraised the option of dynamism if the fake isn’t unfolded up.

Abundantly, perhaps the chief tumult of all is that the frauds craving go unimpeded perfectly. In that exemplar, the eye-popping probability is that Mr. Karzai part from determine. After all, he controls the shape of the Afghan require — first get and weighty the patrol, who are at the meeting place of many of the allegations. And to gig, Mr. Karzai is in the rope: With about 60 proportionality of the ballots counted, Mr. Karzai leads his adjacent demanding, Abdullah, by 47 proportionality to 33 percent. That’s not quite enough for Mr. Karzai to dial out a trek-off election, but partly.

It is here where American wellbeing come most squarely into play. If the Afghan who assumes the tenure — whether it’s Mr. Karzai or Dr. Abdullah — does so under a vapour of fraud, then the Americans could identify themselves money an Afghan chair for the neighboring fivesome senescence who is not regarded as probable in the seeing of routine Afghans. And that’s strictly business as Pilot Obama has recommitted himself to frequent here.

Nevertheless so further, from the American Legate, there has been only subjugate.