KABUL, 6 October 2005 — Counting is nearly complete in landmark Afghan legislative polls, with warlords and opponents of President Hamid Karzai faring relatively well, but women could hold the balance of power in the new national assembly. Audits still have to be completed in some provinces and final provisional results will be released only slowly in coming days while suspicion of ballot stuffing and other fraud at more than 1,000 of nearly 27,000 polling stations are checked.
“The physical count is complete with the exception of those materials placed in quarantine and those subject to audit,” said Aleem Siddique, spokesman of the UN-Afghan election commission. Final provisional results are expected from at least two provinces today, a day later than planned due to Tuesday’s holiday for the start of Ramadan. Final results from the Sept. 18 vote, which also chose provincial councils, are due by Oct. 22, after complaints are resolved.
Partial provisional results suggest Karzai’s male opponents may have an edge over his male backers, but 68 assembly seats reserved for women could mean they hold the balance of power. There are a total of 249 seats in the assembly. Dozens of factional officials, dubbed warlords by critics, appear headed for seats, as well as at least one former Taleban commander.
Prominent among factional commanders is Shiite Muslim leader Haji Muhammad Mohaqiq, who has been heading the closely watched race for one of Kabul’s 33 seats. Like some rivals, Mohaqiq has been linked by rights groups to atrocities during Afghanistan’s long civil war.
The presence of such figures on the ballot has been cited by analysts and poll observers as one of the reasons for the lower turnout in the polls compared with October’s presidential vote. Self-styled opposition leader Yunus Qanuni appears certain of a seat, but might be disappointed to be lagging in second place in Kabul after being trounced by Karzai in the presidential race.
Qanuni said before the polls he expected supporters of his opposition Understanding Front to win half of the 249 assembly seats and warned they might not endorse all of Karzai’s Cabinet.
Qanuni yesterday said it was too early to say if Karzai’s supporters or the opposition had a majority, as results had not been finalized. The main foreign election observer mission, from the European Union, last week highlighted “worrying” cases of cheating, having initially declared that the vote had appeared generally well run.
Some poll observers have expressed concern that fraud, if not properly dealt with, could mean warlords gain disproportionate representation, which could allow them to block efforts to account for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The most problematic province has been Paktika in the southeast, where votes from no less than 274 stations have been quarantined over alleged ballot stuffing and mass proxy voting. The election in Paktika was particularly charged after it emerged that two candidates there were linked to the killings of hundreds of communist soldiers in the 1980s whose remains were unearthed in a remote part of the province last week.
Also controversial is Paghman, a Kabul district that is the support base of Abdul Rabb Rasoul Sayyaf, a powerful factional leader and ally of Karzai running a distant fourth in Kabul. Officials say ballots from more than 90 polling stations in Paghman have been quarantined, mainly over ballot stuffing.
Meanwhile, NATO leaders seeking to resolve differences over a plan to take control of the war on militants in Afghanistan visited troops yesterday as a suicide bombing underscored the dangers to foreign forces. NATO, which currently leads a peacekeeping operation in Afghanistan, plans to expand its operations in the insurgent troubled south next year and then to take command of US-led foreign forces battling the stubborn Taleban-led insurgency.
The United States, which has about two-thirds of the foreign troops in Afghanistan and is looking to cut its commitment given pressures in Iraq, has been trying to get European allies to take on more of the burden of the war against Afghan militants. But NATO allies France, Germany and Spain last month rejected the US call, insisting NATO should stick to peacekeeping.
France reiterated on Tuesday it opposed combining NATO-led forces and US-led troops in Afghanistan under one command, putting it at odds with visiting Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
NATO is now exploring a so-called “dual-hated” solution to the command arrangements that would give one commander overall control of operations but would strictly separate peacekeeping and counter-insurgency work.
A top level NATO mission led by Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and including NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe General James Jones and ambassadors from the 26 NATO states began a visit to discuss the expansion plans on Tuesday.
Maj. Andrew Elmes, a spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force peacekeepers, played down differences among alliance members. “It’s not problematic, it’s a discussion on agreeing how the command and control structure will look,” he said.
