Obama's last chance for exit from Afghanistan

By Gwynne Dyer
Salt Lake Tribune
Updated: 11/04/2009

There must be a better way to rig an election.

First the Western powers occupying Afghanistan let President Hamid Karzai stay in the job for months after his term actually expired, on the grounds that an election in the late summer would be easier to arrange. They finally held the election in August and declared it a shining success: Karzai, Washington's man in Kabul, had been re-elected, even though turnout nationally was only 30 percent. (In the Taliban-dominated south, it was only 5 percent.)

President Barack Obama, who was already under great pressure to send more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, declared that "This was an important step forward in the Afghan people's effort to take control of their future." And then it all fell apart.

As the evidence emerged that up to a third of the votes allegedly cast for Karzai had been fraudulent, the United States backed away from celebrating his "re-election." Indeed, the fraud was so blatant and massive that even the Afghans began to choke on it, and various American emissaries threatened and bullied Karzai into accepting a run-off vote against his closest rival in the first round of voting, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah.

That vote would have been held this Saturday, but Abdullah knew that he would lose again. He belongs to the Tajik ethnic group, and there are twice as many Pashtuns (Karzai's ethnic group) in Afghanistan as there are Tajiks. So Abdullah complained that the election officials conducting

this runoff would be exactly the same men who had rigged the first round -- which was quite true -- and demanded their resignation.

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