Posted on 10/21/2009 8:27:31 AM PDT by george76
No one will ever know how Afghans voted in their country's presidential elections on Aug. 20, 2009. Seven weeks after the polling, the U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission ... is still trying to separate fraudulent tallies from ballots.
In some provinces, many more votes were counted than were cast. E.U. election monitors characterize 1.5 million votes as suspect, which would include up to one-third of the votes cast for incumbent President Hamid Karzai. Once fraud occurs on the scale of what took place in Afghanistan, it is impossible to untangle.
Afghanistan's fraudulent elections complicate President Obama's job as he weighs a recommendation from General Stanley McChrystal, his top commander there, to send as many as 40,000 additional troops to support a beefed-up counterinsurgency strategy. But for that strategy to work, the U.S. needs a credible Afghan partner, which Afghanistan's elections now seem unlikely to produce.
This is an account of what went wrong — and why success in Afghanistan will remain beyond our grasp until the problems I witnessed are fixed.
The Ghost Vote.
Afghans perpetrated the fraud, and they are, of course, ultimately responsible for the consequences. They include the local election staff, government officials and local warlords and power brokers. Afghanistan's Independent Elections Commission (IEC), a seven-member board appointed by Karzai to supervise the elections...
In July, I learned that there were 1,500 polling centers (out of a total of 7,000) sited in places either controlled by the Taliban or so insecure that no one from the IEC, the Afghan army or the Afghan police had ever visited. It was obvious that these polling centers would never open on election day. They were also perfect vehicles for fraud.
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
Sounds like Chicago or Philly.
“.... fraudulent elections complicate President Obama’s job...”
LOL, yes, we know all too well.
Apparently, ACORN is thriving in Afghanistan.
Truth? Who knows. I only know that Obama wasn’t happy with Karzai. So Karzai has to run again. I don’t know what’s best for Afghanistan, I just want the best for our brave Military in country. Obama’s meddling in foreign countries is more far reaching than any other CIC in our history. And he has the LEAST amount of experience. Pray for our country.
Ah-ah,
Who was the candidate of the White House and who was James Carville working for?
How do you say Acorn in Austrian errr I mean Afghani
Yep. Bammy is OK w/ I'm-a-nut-job so his election is OK. Not-OK w/ Karzai so his election is not-OK.
Simple really...
The tribes are all suspicious of one another, with good reason, so it would be hard for anyone to get a clear majority.
What’s obvious is that Obama and his UN pals don’t like Karzai.
Hey, Obama, what do you think of the recent elections in Cuba and Venezuela and Iran and North Korea and Libya and China and . . . ? Were they fair? Because these are the kind of guys who control UN opinion and dominate the Human Rights Council.
Dr. Abdullah Abdullah
Even corrected for fraud, Karzai still leads Abdullah Abdullah by at least 5 points. The mountain snows will be in before a revote.
Karzai knew all this all along that is why he delayed the first vote.
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