Abdullah Abdullah - Tag Search

It's day three of the Afghan peace jirga -- the event being (somewhat absurdly) hailed by participants and Western diplomats as Afghanistan's "last chance for peace."

Roughly 1,600 delegates are discussing a "peace plan" promoted by Afghan president Hamid Karzai, the details of which have leaked out over the last few weeks. Al-Jazeera's James Bays posted some of the highlights, which focus on the logistics of the program: identifying and vetting Taliban fighters who are open to reconciliation, finding them jobs, establishing "deradicalization programs," etc.

Abdullah Abdullah issued a statement today slamming Hamid Karzai's "re-election" as illegal and his government as illegitimate.

Abdullah is obviously angling for a role in Afghanistan's next government, as Steve Coll noted yesterday. He's setting himself up as a persistent Karzai critic, challenging the government and critiquing Karzai's penchant for corruption. But he's also urging his supporters to remain calm, because he knows that any incitement to violence would cost him international support (not to mention create huge unrest in Afghanistan).

So far he seems to be "walking the tightrope" fairly well, as The Guardian put it. Now the question is what concessions Karzai will make to placate Abdullah.

Breaking news out of Kabul: The Independent Election Commission has cancelled the runoff election scheduled for Nov. 7. The decision comes just a day after Abdullah Abdullah dropped out.

Monday morning update: Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission has canceled the the runoff election.

As you've undoubtedly heard by now, Abdullah Abdullah, Hamid Karzai's main challenger in the Afghan elections, has withdrawn from the runoff scheduled for Nov. 7.

His decision, announced today at a press conference in Kabul, confirms 36 hours of speculation that he would drop out.

Abdullah told thousands of cheering supporters that he would drop out of the race because of "the wrongdoing of the Independent Election Commission and the abuse of power by the government." But he stopped short of calling for a boycott of the election, according to Pajhwok (sub. required), and he encouraged his supporters to remain calm.

CNN is reporting that Abdullah Abdullah will drop out of the Afghan runoff scheduled for Nov. 7. The report is attributed to a single "Western source close to the Afghan leadership" -- Zalmay Khalilzad, maybe? -- and says Abdullah will formally announce his decision this weekend.

Khalilzad is quoted on the record later in the story -- which doesn't necessarily mean he isn't also the unnamed source quoted at the top.

Update: The Times of London advances the story a bit with quotes from several sources who say it is "increasingly unlikely" that Abdullah will take part in the runoff.

Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, says his country may ship at least part of its uranium stockpile to Russia for further enrichment.

That would mean the Iranian government is willing to at least partially accept the draft IAEA deal announced last week. But Mottaki said Iran will also continue to enrich its own uranium. The IAEA deal is designed to buy time for further negotiations by temporarily taking away Iran's capacity to enrich uranium.

French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner said as much today during an interview with the Daily Telegraph. Kouchner said Israel "will not accept" an Iranian bomb, and said the IAEA deal is designed to head off a potential Israeli attack.

Abdullah Abdullah, Hamid Karzai's chief challenger, has agreed to a runoff election, but says the government needs to provide better security than it did during the general election.

Speaking at his house in the capital, Kabul, he said: "Some people lost their finger in the last round elections [so] this is a serious issue, and in order to prepare the ground for transparency and fairness of the elections we have certain recommendations, suggestions as well as conditions that ... we will come up with soon."

Abdullah also called for tougher steps to prevent voter fraud, though he said no voters should be disenfranchised. Hundreds of polling stations are in remote areas in southern Afghanistan -- difficult for the government to monitor.

Karzai agreed yesterday to accept a runoff.

Incumbent President Hamid Karzai, who won around 55 percent of the vote in the now-discredited Aug. 20 elections, has conceded that massive fraud occurred and will agree to a recount to be set for Nov. 7, within the two weeks mandated by the country's constitution. But at least one news agency is reporting that he and chief rival Abdullah Abdullah have agreed to share power in a coalition government.

The New York Times, citing anonymous officials and its own analysis, is reporting that incumbent President Hamid Karzai will lose a whopping 874,000 votes in the recount of Afghanistan's fraudulent August election, shrinking his share of the total to somewhere between 48 and 49 percent and necessitating a runoff.

Gregg has already written about Karzai's disappearing margin of victory and the byzantine recount decision, overseen by the joint United Nations/Afghan Electoral Complaints Commission and released yesterday, that is making it disappear.

Byzantine or not, what makes the ECC's recount fun for the whole family is the fact that the organization is releasing basically all of its data in raw form. That means you too can spend endless hours deducing where the fraud took place, from the comfort of your own home. Here's how to do it (bonus points if you can tell us how the Times got to the number 874,000):

The Electoral Complaints Commission has released the final results of its recount; press release is here (pdf) and the full text of each decision is available online.

The results now go to the Independent Electoral Commission, the Afghan body responsible for adjusting each candidate's vote total. The BBC says the recount will strip enough votes from Karzai to necessitate a runoff.

I've been trying to figure out Hamid Karzai's strategy with regards to the Afghan election and the possibility of a runoff. You can sum it up in one word: delay.

The latest news is that the Independent Electoral Commission, an Afghan panel stacked with Karzai loyalists, has delayed the release of the U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission's recount. The ECC is expected to announce that Karzai's vote tally has dropped to 47 percent, necessitating a runoff.

IEC officials tell The Guardian they're considering legal challenges to the recount.

The biggest story this morning, which we blogged separately, was a double suicide bombing in southeastern Iran that killed nearly 30 people, including the deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guards.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan: Diplomats from several countries, including the U.S. and France, are pressuring Afghan president Hamid Karzai to accept the results of the Electoral Complaints Commission's recount.

French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner said Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah are willing to "work together" after the results are announced. That announcement could come as soon as today or tomorrow.

Afghanistan's ambassador to the U.S., Said Tayeb Jawad, says a runoff election appears likely. Jawad works for Karzai, and he probably wouldn't make that statement without his boss's approval.

This could just be more expectation-setting. The Karzai government publicly resigns itself to a recount, ordered by an Electoral Complaints Commission that Karzai contends is rigged against him. And then -- miraculously! -- the ECC declares Karzai the winner.

If that's the case, Karzai might offer Abdullah a cabinet job, something to silence him. So Abdullah has the next move: accept Karzai's offer? Or continue to complain about voter fraud?

Maulavi Mustafa Barakzai, one of the two Afghans on the U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission, resigned yesterday over alleged "foreign interference" in the recount.

Today, his top challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, says Barakzai's resignation was orchestrated by Afghan president Hamid Karzai.

A deputy campaign manager for the former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, Mr Karzai's top challenger, called the resignation a move by the Karzai campaign to call into question the validity of the fraud investigations.

"Barakzai's resignation has direct connection to Karzai. It was Karzai's idea," Saleh Mohammad Registani said. "Karzai is trying to bring the work of the ECC into question."

No response from Karzai yet. The U.N. says it will release the results of the Afghan recount in a matter of days.

The Afghan election recount looks like more of a farce every day.

The Electoral Complaints Commission, the U.N.-backed "watchdog," is recounting about 12 percent of ballot boxes. The ECC published its recount rules today: The commission will treat all candidates as equally guilty of fraud. It will nullify ballots in proportion with the total number of suspicious ballots in each ballot box.

For example: Let's say the ECC recounts a box with 1,000 ballots and determines that 500 -- 50 percent -- are fraudulent. It will then invalidate 50 percent of Karzai's votes from that box, 50 percent of Abdullah's votes, 50 percent of Ghani's, etc.

It doesn't matter who actually perpetrated the fraud, which means candidates will be deprived of legitimate votes. And since Karzai is believed to be responsible for the worst fraud, he stands to benefit the most from this policy.

NATO's foreign ministers have decided to anoint Karzai the winner of last month's election, despite the mounting evidence of widespread fraud.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization foreign ministers reached "consensus" that Karzai would probably "continue to be president" at a Friday meeting in New York with Afghan Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta, a US official told the newspaper.

On the one hand, you can view this as a smart act of realpolitik. The U.N.'s limited recount probably won't swing the result of the election. It's almost certain, whenever the final results are announced, that Karzai will be declared the winner. So NATO is dealing with reality here.

The head of the U.N. Electoral Complaints Commission in Afghanistan, Grant Kippen, told Al-Jazeera that his team "will not be rushed." Apparently it will be another week before the ECC can even say how long it will take to investigate complaints of voter fraud in Afghanistan. (View a map of the complaints the ECC is dealing with here.)

This is basically the worst-case scenario for the Afghan election. It creates a power vacuum: Karzai thinks he's been re-elected, as do his supporters, but he hasn't officially been re-elected.

It also creates an information vacuum: In the absence of an official verdict on voter fraud, imaginations will run wild. The E.U. has already proclaimed that one-third of the vote could be fraudulent. That number might be accurate, or it might be wildly off-base; nobody knows. Until the U.N. issues a verdict, though, that number will keep getting tossed around.

One other concern: A lengthy U.N. investigation makes it virtually impossible to hold a run-off election this year (if necessary), because Afghanistan's harsh winter makes parts of the country impassable.

As Hamid Karzai claims the Afghan vote was fair, and U.S. officials worry about a recount that might already be in the works, the semi-independent Electoral Complaints Commission is sifting through more than 2,000 allegations of fraud, which could lead to the invalidation of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of votes. To keep up with it, I've created a map of the complaints.

I'll create some more maps later to show how the complaints correlate (or don't) with Karzai's margin of victory. Right now, the fraud looks fairly egalitarian. The worst two provinces, Kabul and Baghlan, split between Karzai and his rival, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah. In Herat, the third-worst in terms of fraud, Karzai beat Abdullah, but the margin - 11 percentage points - wasn't as ridiculous as elsewhere.

The EU's election monitoring mission says 1.5 million ballots could be fraudulent, most of them (1.1 million) for Karzai. That would mean fraud is far more widespread than the Electoral Complaints Commission acknowledged yesterday, when it announced a recount at 10 percent of polling stations -- see our analysis of the numbers here.

This would lend some weight to Peter Galbraith's argument that his boss at the U.N., Kai Eide, isn't taking fraud seriously enough. The Daily Telegraph advances that story today (h/t Juan Cole) with an interview with an unnamed senior U.N. source who wants Eide fired "for failing to stand up to massive vote rigging."

AP reports that Afghanistan's Electoral Complaints Commission has ordered a recount of 10 percent of the country's polling stations.

That means about 2,600 polling places will be up for review. If they're a representative sample of Afghanistan's polling stations, then about 500,000 ballots will be recounted (roughly 5 million people voted in total). That's a big number, but unless all 500,000 were Karzai votes that switch to other candidates, Karzai will still have more than 50 percent of the vote.

These polling stations might not be a representative sample, though. Most of the polling stations under review had suspicious turnout numbers. At some, an incredulous 100 percent of ballots were cast; at others, 95 percent of voters chose a single candidate.

We mentioned last week that most Afghan polling places had between 600 and 700 ballots. So -- theoretically -- up to 1.5 million ballots could be recounted here. That would have a meaningful impact on the results.