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Papers
- -Karzai: U.S. Is 7 Years Too Late in Afghanistan (PBS.org)
"In an interview with Margaret Warner, Afghan President Hamid Karzai welcomed additional U.S. troops, but said they were "seven years too late." He also endorsed reaching out to members of the Taliban who embraced the Afghan constitution." 03-09
- Editorial: Why Elections in Afghanistan Were Never the Answer (Time.com)
"...Afghanistan is in the grip of a civil war that pits a U.S.-backed political establishment, which includes both Karzai and Abdullah, against the Taliban."
"No one actually voted for the Taliban, of course, and its call for a boycott of the poll was enforced by threat of death. But whether out of fear, political choice or sheer indifference, 12 million voters — representing 70% of the electorate, compared with just 30% in 2004 — stayed away from the ballot stations. A runoff election was expected to see an even smaller turnout."
The author concluded that "any political solution in Afghanistan will have be negotiated on the basis of the real distribution of power, rather than votes cast in an election staged in the heat of a civil war." 11-09
- How the Afghan Election Was Rigged (Time.com)
"No one will ever know how Afghans voted in their country's presidential elections on Aug. 20, 2009. Seven weeks after the polling, the U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) is still trying to separate fraudulent tallies from ballots. In some provinces, many more votes were counted than were cast. E.U. election monitors characterize 1.5 million votes as suspect, which would include up to one-third of the votes cast for incumbent President Hamid Karzai. Once fraud occurs on the scale of what took place in Afghanistan, it is impossible to untangle." 10-09
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