Too soon to judge vote, say Afghan authorities

KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghan authorities said Monday it was too early to judge the validity of the country’s parliamentary ballot despite observers’ reports of widespread fraud in the vote that was to help consolidate its shaky democracy.

Also Monday, Britain’s military handed the U.S. responsibility for a dangerous district in southern Afghanistan that has been the scene of some of the bloodiest fighting involving British troops for the past four years.

Despite Taliban rocket strikes and bombings, Afghans voted Saturday for a new parliament, the first election since a fraud-tainted presidential ballot last year that cast doubt on the legitimacy of the government.

The independent Free and Fair Elections Foundation of Afghanistan, the observer group that deployed about 7,000 observers to monitor the elections, voiced “serious concerns” about the quality of the elections.

It said in its preliminary report published Monday that the parliamentary vote was marred by ballot-stuffing, proxy voting, underage voting, the use of fake voter identification cards and repeated voting.

The group urged President Hamid Karzai’s government to allow an independent investigation into re-ports of widespread electoral fraud, including intimidation of voters and interference by powerful warlords.

The state electoral commission, however, criticized observer groups and the media for being “quick to imply the electoral process is unsuccessful based on allegations of fraud and misconduct.”

“Cases of fraud and misconduct are inevitable in the current security climate,” the commission said in a statement. But it pledged full commitment “to working with the Electoral Complaints Commission to eliminate the effect from the final results as far as possible.”

Afghan officials have started gathering and tallying election results. Preliminary tallies may be released this week and final results are expected in late October.

Meanwhile, the opposition alliance headed by Abdullah Abdullah, who lost the presidential election to Karzai last year, said its own vote tallies, based on partial results, show that it is certain to win 70 seats, and once all results are in, it may win as many as 100 in the 249-seat parliament.

That would be a significant increase from the 40 to 50 supporters that Abdullah’s followers in the National Alliance for Change and Hope could count on in the last parliament, they said.

Supporters of Karzai said it was too early to predict an outcome.

A repeat of the pervasive fraud at the presidential election a year ago could further erode the standing of Karzai’s administration as it struggles against a Taliban insurgency.

As Karzai has faced corruption scandals and President Barack Obama confronts declining public support for the war with the Taliban that this year is costing the U.S. $105 billion, both governments say they hope the election will help cement the political system built since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001.

“The results and quality of the election will not be immediately evident,” the U.S. Embassy said in a statement from Kabul. The U.S. “will support the Afghan independent electoral institutions as they do their work in the coming weeks, including carrying out thorough measures to detect and adjudicate fraud.”

Meanwhile, the Pentagon said the number of insurgent attacks during the election was one-third lower than during the presidential election last year, citing preliminary information from the U.S. military in Afghanistan.

“Less than 1 percent of polling stations experienced significant violence,” Colonel David Lapan, a spokesman for the Defense Department, said Monday. “While there was violence, they saw it at lower levels than the last election.”

Officials said militant attacks on election day killed at least 21 civilians and nine police officers.

The Washington-based National Democratic Institute said in a statement Monday that although violence marred the electoral process, “millions of Afghans turned out to vote ... showing courage and resolve to move their nation toward a more democratic future.”

The group, which sent observers to 730 polling stations in 30 out of 34 provinces, said in a report Monday that the conduct of the ballot showed “substantial improvement overpast elections,” in part because of the removal of 6,000 officials suspected of fraud in the 2009 presidential poll and the introduction of unique serial numbers on voting slips.

But the group also pointed out that many problems still have not been addressed. These include “a defective voter registration process, barriers to women’s participation, and the need to secure the independence from the executive of Afghanistan’s two election bodies.”

But Afghan officials said it was too soon to judge the validity of the vote based on such findings.

“We did succeed in having an election in almost all over Afghanistan, but that does not mean that we did not have difficulties in terms of arrangements for the elections,” Karzai’s spokesman Waheed Omar said, adding that it was too early to discuss the quality of the elections.

Nader Nadery, the head of the Afghan observer group, said that those responsible for election irregularities should be prosecuted and that this could not be done without the support of top officials.

“Investigating these irregularities would increase the political credibility of the government,” Nadery said. “It would be good for their own reputation.”

The group said one of its major concerns was more than 300 instances of intimidation and coercion of voters by local warlords and power brokers - some with close ties to Karzai’s government - who are seeking to remain in power by having their own candidates run in the elections.

“We had more than 280 cases of direct attacks by the insurgents and we also had 157 cases of warlords committing violence,” Nadery said. “Both are dangerous for the future of democracy in this country.”

Candidates can submit complaints to the elections fraud watchdog, the Electoral Complaints Commission. This panel of five people is the final arbiter on fraud allegations, and it was the body that invalidated nearly a third of Karzai’s votes last year. The panel is significantly weaker than in the presidential election, when it was dominated by U.N. appointees.

This year, the majority of the panel is Afghan, and the entire group has been appointed by the government.

In other developments Monday, Britain’s military handed the U.S. responsibility for the northern Sangin district in Helmand province.

British forces arrived in the district in 2006 and have lost more than 100 troops there in fierce fighting with Taliban insurgents - nearly a third of the 337 fatalities it has suffered in Afghanistan since 2001.

NATO said the 40 Commando Royal Marines were being reassigned throughout the center of Helmand, which remains a volatile battleground even though tens of thousands of NATO and Afghan troops moved into the area in February.

Under the new NATO deployment plan, which was announced in July, the U.S. will operate mainly in the north and south of Helmand, with British, Danish and Estonian troops working in the heavily populated central areas.

Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, the No. 2 American general in Afghanistan and the operational chief for the allied forces, said in July the British move was part of his effort to consolidate and better organize forces in Helmand.

Britain, the second largest contributor of international troops after the United States, has 9,500 troops in Afghanistan. About 1,200 have already been moved from Sangin into central Helmand province.

“Our troops have done a magnificent job. They have transformed Sangin,” British Prime Minister David Cameron said Monday. “But it’s right to make this decision because we should be concentrating our forces where they can have the greatest possible impact. We should be sharing the burden fairly with our allies.”

The coalition also reported that an international service member died Monday following an insurgent attack in southern Afghanistan. The service member’s nationality was not released.

The pace of combat fatalities in Afghanistan slowed slightly in August after hitting the highest levels of the nine year war in June and July.

Information for this article was contributed by Dusan Stojanovic and Deb Riechmann of The Associated Press; by Eltaf Najafizada and Viola Gienger of Bloomberg News; by Laura King and Henry Chu of the Los Angeles Times; and by Rod Nordland and Alissa J. Rubin of The New York Times.