Monday, 31. August 2009 9:44
Over the years, Mr. Karzai has been able to use Americas commitment to Afghanistan to his own advantage: However frustrated the Americans were with Mr. Karzai, he could be sure the Americans wouldnt walk away. That limited their leverage in trying to force Mr. Karzai to undertake changes that the Americans believed would help stem the resurgence of the Taliban.
And so it is today. However troubled American officials are by the allegations of vote rigging, they are reluctant to overtly intervene in Afghanistans electoral process. They appear to be staking their hopes that the charges of vote-rigging can be sorted out, mainly by the Electoral Complaints Commission, which is dominated by non-Afghans appointed by the United Nations representative here. On Friday, Reuters reported that classic timberlandlover the commission was saying it had more than 2,000 complaints of fraud or abuse, 270 of them serious enough to potentially change the outcome.
A process exists that we believe is capable of adjudicating the complaints and determining whether or not there was fraud, Ambassador Carney said.
Its possible that Mr. Karzai could fail to capture 50 percent of the vote, forcing him to stand in a runoff election against his nearest challenger. But that is precisely what Mr. Abdullah and others are worried will never happen.
The next several days could prove decisive, and in more ways than one. The votes are expected to chukka shoes be counted by the second week of September. By then, officials on the Election Complaints Commission should have a better sense of how substantive the election fraud was. And this week, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American commander in the country, is expected to deliver his assessment of the Afghan situation to President Obama. That report could lay the groundwork for a request for more troops.
The situation on the battlefield is difficult on its own. But it is, of course, inevitably bound up with the political stalemate in Kabul. As American commanders and diplomats have said repeatedly here, no amount of troops can substitute for a lack of political consensus among ordinary Afghans.
In this way, the politics in Kabul and the fighting in the south feed off of each other, for timber sports better or worse.
If people decide that we could not give them anything through the democratic process, then the insurgency will be strengthened, Mr. Abdullah said. And then the United States will need to bring more troops and more resources here and for what?
Thats a question that President Obama, General McChrystal and, ultimately, the American people, will have to decide.