I was off the grid all day, so I'm just now getting a chance to respond to the reports that the Afghan government was negotiating with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar when he was arrested by Pakistani and U.S. intelligence.

Karzai "was very angry" when he heard that the Pakistanis had picked up Baradar with an assist from U.S. intelligence, the adviser said. Besides the ongoing talks, he said Baradar had "given a green light" to participating in a three-day peace jirga that Karzai is hosting next month.

If this report is true, it basically confirms one of the two rumors about Pakistan's motives for arresting Baradar: The ISI wants to control Taliban reconciliation talks in Afghanistan, so it's going to round up "moderate" Afghan Taliban figures who are talking directly with Karzai and replace them with "extremists" loyal to the ISI (Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, come on down).

Update, 9:12 a.m.: IHEC just released numbers from the last four governorates (Dhi Qar, Kirkuk, Sulaymaniyah, and Wassit) still uncounted. We now have preliminary tallies from all 18 provinces -- though some are still less than 20 percent complete.

Original post: Another batch of results from Iraq, this time from Karbala province, where prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's State of Law coalition has a roughly two-to-one lead over the Iraqi National Alliance. You can view the latest results here.

The Independent High Electoral Commission hasn't posted numbers from Kirkuk yet, but there are reports that Iyad Allawi's Iraqiyya coalition has a narrow lead over the Kurdistan Alliance. That would be a surprising outcome -- though preliminary results could oversample Sunni neighborhoods and therefore be misleading.

Abraham Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League -- last seen using his position to attack noted anti-Semite Joe Biden -- now wants everyone to know that the main force undermining Middle East peace is the Obama administration's "flawed policy" and not, say, Israel's inflexible right-wing government.

An airstrike in Yemen's Abyan province killed two alleged al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula members -- at least according to Yemen's interior ministry. But there are reports in the Yemeni press (عربي) that the bombing actually targeted members of the Southern Movement. 

The interior ministry says the attack was carried out by the Yemeni air force (it's probably keen to dispel any rumors of U.S. involvement). Security officials say the victims were AQAP members, plotting to attack targets on the Arabian Sea (a claim we've heard before).

Struan Stevenson, the president of the European Union's delegation to Iraq, complained on Friday about vote tampering, which he said boosted prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's State of Law coalition at the expense of Iyad Allawi's Iraqiyya bloc.

Stevenson's office sent us a press release this morning that contains further allegations of fraud, both before and after the ballot.

Walid Jumblatt, the leader of Lebanon's Progressive Socialist Party, says he didn't really mean to call Syrian president Bashar al-Assad a "savage" or "an Israeli product."

Jumblatt made those comments in February 2007, at a memorial service for the assassinated Lebanese leader Rafiq al-Hariri. At the time, Jumblatt was positioning himself as staunchly anti-Syrian; he blamed Assad for Hariri's murder, and fretted publicly that he too would be the victim of a Syrian car bomb.

Important story by Mark Perry this morning on Foreign Policy's Middle East Channel: Gen. David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, reportedly warned the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the White House that the Israeli-Arab conflict is endangering U.S. interests in the region.

We've updated our Iraqi election results page with numbers from Baghdad, Muthanna, Ninewa and Qadisiyah provinces. Note that these are very preliminary results -- the Independent High Electoral Commission has tallied less than 20 percent of the ballots in each of these provinces. You can view the latest results here.

Four explosions struck the southern Afghan city of Kandahar on Saturday night, killing at least 35 and wounding around 45, according to Al-Jazeera.

Three of the bombs appeared to be a diversion to a larger blast at a prison that had been targeted during a successful jailbreak two years ago, Reuters reported.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attacks and called them a "message" to NATO commanders who have announced an impending offensive in Kandahar this summer, similar to the just-completed operation in Marja.

I put together a dedicated page for the latest Iraqi election results; we'll update this table whenever IHEC releases new data.