Hamid Karzai appears destined to remain in power as Afghanistan's president, yet there is little doubt that this was a stolen election. The Karzai government's lack of legitimacy presents a serious challenge for its backers. As Peter Graff at Reuters asked: "Can President Barack Obama ask Americans to send more of their sons and daughters to die in Afghanistan to defend a government willing to steal an election? "That is the stark political question that US officials may have to grapple with in the next few weeks if President Hamid Karzai continues to ignore evidence of fraud in last month's Afghan presidential poll." The New York Times said: "As President Obama prepares to decide whether to send additional troops to Afghanistan, the political climate appears increasingly challenging for him, leaving him in the awkward position of relying on the Republican Party, and not his own, for support... "Congressional Democrats, particularly those on the left, report increasing disenchantment among constituents with the idea of a long and possibly escalating conflict in Afghanistan, especially as the American strategy comes to resemble a long-term nation-building approach rather than a counterterrorism operation. " 'I and the American people cannot tolerate more troops without some commitment about when this perceived occupation will end,' Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, said Wednesday in an interview. He said he had been to 60 town hall meetings in his state so far this year. During the first half of the year, he said, there were no comments about Afghanistan or Iraq. But in the past two months, that has changed, with more people focused on troop losses in Afghanistan. "Andrew J Bacevich, a professor of international relations and history at Boston University, said, 'There was a time, back in 2003 and 2004, when it was possible to drum up popular support for the war by attaching to the argument claims that the United States of America was eliminating evil and advancing democracy and women's rights. " 'But this is many years later, with the economy in shambles, 5,000 American soldiers dead in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those notions are no longer as compelling as they might have been. War exhaustion sets in,' said Professor Bacevich, author of The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. "Even one strain of conservative thinking has turned negative on the war. The syndicated columnist George F Will wrote in a column published Tuesday that the United States should substantially reduce its presence in Afghanistan." McClatchy Newspapers noted: "The administration's stated goals in Afghanistan have ranged from eliminating the threat posed by al Qa'eda - which is based in neighbouring Pakistan, not in Afghanistan - and building a stable democratic state, depending on what administration official is speaking and when. "On Thursday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates attempted to define the administration's strategy. He said that before the September 11, 2001, attacks, the Taliban not only provided al Qa'eda refuge, but also 'cooperated and collaborated' with the terrorist group. Because of that, he said, the US must ensure that a stable government exists in Afghanistan so the Taliban - and ultimately al Qa'eda - can't return. "The situation in Afghanistan, including last month's still-inconclusive election and McChrystal's review, have made it hard for the president to speak out more definitively, said Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the center-left Brookings Institution who was in Afghanistan for the August election. "Obama must do so soon, however, O'Hanlon said: 'He can't expect the country to continue to tolerate a mission that he himself has not explained.' "But despite [the argument presented by the conservative columnist George Will], national security hawks in the Republican Party - not Mr Obama's most natural support base - still back the president on Afghanistan." Abubakar Siddique wrote at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: "The Afghan election was expected to deliver a new administration that would work with its international partners to deliver improved governance and play its role in defeating the Taliban insurgency. "Instead, the Afghan political elite is splitting into increasingly hostile camps, raising questions in Western capitals about what happens next. " 'Overall, whatever side wins in this contest, the Afghan public is the loser because they couldn't choose their real representative in this presidential election,' says parliamentarian Kabir Ranjbar, who supported former Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani in the presidential ballot. 'The international community is to be blamed for this because during the past seven years they empowered rapacious warlords and imposed them as rulers on the Afghan people.' "Ranjbar also blames both Karzai and [his principal opponent, Abdullah] Abdullah for helping establish what he calls a 'warlord-dominated political system'." In an account providing details of the alleged fraud that occured on election day, The New York Times reported: "Afghans loyal to President Hamid Karzai set up hundreds of fictitious polling sites where no one voted but where hundreds of thousands of ballots were still recorded toward the president's re-election, according to senior Western and Afghan officials here. "The fake sites, as many as 800, existed only on paper, said a senior Western diplomat in Afghanistan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the political delicacy of the vote. Local workers reported that hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of votes for Mr Karzai in the election last month came from each of those places. That pattern was confirmed by another Western official based in Afghanistan. " 'We think that about 15 per cent of the polling sites never opened on election day,' the senior Western diplomat said. 'But they still managed to report thousands of ballots for Karzai.' "Besides creating the fake sites, Mr Karzai's supporters also took over approximately 800 legitimate polling centers and used them to fraudulently report tens of thousands of additional ballots for Mr Karzai, the officials said." In another report, The Times said: "On Monday, as the vote-counting in Afghanistan was nearing an end, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was briefed by the American ambassador in Kabul, Karl W Eikenberry. The same day, the ambassador delivered a blunt message to the front-runner, President Hamid Karzai: 'Don't declare victory.' "The slim majority tentatively awarded Mr Karzai in Afghanistan's fraud-scarred election has put the Obama administration in an awkward spot: trying to balance its professed determination to investigate mounting allegations of corruption and vote-rigging while not utterly alienating the man who seems likely to remain the country's leader for another five years. "Mrs Clinton and Ambassador Eikenberry, senior administration officials said, wanted to prevent Mr Karzai or his backers from pre-empting an outside investigation of allegations of irregularities in the August 20 vote."
pwoodward@thenational.ae