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Afghan Elections Spoiled : By Faulty Ink or Fraud?

By Jeralyn, Section Foreign Affairs
Posted on Sat Oct 09, 2004 at 05:53:50 PM EST
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Karzai's Opponents are claiming fraud in today's Afghan elections.

Afghans packed polling stations on Saturday for a historic presidential election that was blemished when all 15 candidates opposing U.S.-backed interim President Hamid Karzai withdrew, charging the government and the U.N. with fraud and incompetence.

In the end, faulty ink - not Taliban bombs and bullets - threatened three years of painstaking progress toward democracy. The opposition candidates claimed the ink used to mark people's thumbs rubbed off too easily, allowing for mass deception.

Electoral officials rejected opposition demands that voting be stopped at midday, saying it would rob millions of people of their first chance to directly decide their leader, and the joint U.N.-Afghan panel overseeing the election would rule later on the vote's legitimacy.

Things got violent after the voting:

Taliban rebels got into a skirmish with U.S. troops that left at least 25 insurgents dead, and managed to kill three Afghan policemen accompanying ballots back to a counting center after the vote. Eight more police and two civilians died when their vehicles ran over mines.

As usual, Bush is oblivious to reality.

President Bush has held Afghanistan up as an example of flourishing democracy and a precursor to elections his administration insists will move forward in January in Iraq, despite continuing violence there. In St. Louis, the president exulted in the Afghan vote as a "marvelous thing" and said his administration should receive at least partial credit.

Maybe he should begin reading newspapers.

It was a starkly different scene in Kabul, where the opposition candidates met at the house of Uzbek candidate Abdul Satar Sirat and signed a petition saying they would not recognize the vote results.

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