I'm guessing that, at this point Richard Holbrooke is regretting his comparison of potential irregularities in the Afghan election to problems in Minnesota last year:
In the meantime, Karzai is just about one point short of an election result that would avoid a runoff. If that happens, it's hard to see how anyone can view this election as legitimate, which puts coalition forces in the awkward position of fighting a counterinsurgency on behalf of an illegitimate government, which seems utterly self-defeating. Also, one wonders how Tajiks will react to Abdullah Abdullah being beaten in a fraud-driven election, given that at this point they're far more invested in the Afghan government than Pashtuns are. Juan Cole warned the other day that "a major Iran-style post-election struggle between Tajiks and Pashtuns could completely destabilize the country."Some of the reports of electoral fraud have been egregious. Earlier this week, Western and Afghan officials in Afghanistan said that Afghans loyal to Mr. 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. 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.
The result, the officials said, is that in some provinces, the pro-Karzai ballots may exceed the people who actually voted by a factor of 10. “We are talking about orders of magnitude,” a senior Western diplomat said. “This was fraud en masse.”
In Mr. Karzai’s home province, Kandahar, preliminary results indicate that more than 350,000 ballots have been turned in to be counted, but Western officials estimated that only about 25,000 people actually voted there.
I'm not sure if we're going to see a "Iran-style" post-election struggle -- I think there would have to be a great deal more popular investment in the Afghan government for something like that to happen. But if Karzai wins under these circumstances, an escalation in ethnic tensions seems likely -- whether or not Abdullah ends up with a prominent post in Karzai's new government.
-- A. Serwer
