Election fury cited in Afghan death toll

August deadliest of '09 for civilians

— Rising violence ahead of Afghanistan's disputed presidential election made August the deadliest month of the year for civilians, the United Nations said, warning in a new report that attacks could spike again when the final vote results are announced.

A total of 1,500 civilians died in Afghanistan from January through August, according to the report released late Friday.

About three-fourths of the deaths were blamed on militants. The U.N. report did not specify the August death toll, but said the month was the deadliest of the year as the Taliban stepped up an intimidation campaign to discourage Afghans from voting in the Aug. 20 presidential election.

An Associated Press count found a total of 174 civilians were killed in August, 165 of them at the hands of militants.

The U.N. said coalition forces were to blame for about a quarter of civilian deaths in 2009 - most of them in airstrikes. The top NATO commander, U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has made protecting Afghan civilians a top priority.

Bombs and suicide attacksaccounted for 39.5 percent of civilian deaths this year, the U.N. said, warning there are "fears of a return to violence when election results are announced."

Afghan election officials are currently involved in a recount.

In the country's latest violence, 18 Taliban militants were killed in a battle after they attacked a government building early Saturday in the Dushti Archi district of northern Kunduz province, Gov. Mohammad Omar said. None of the Afghan army soldiers or police officers that responded to the attack was killed, he said.

Also Saturday, an adviser said President Barack Obama has scheduled at least five meetings with his national security team over the next weeks to re-examine Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy.

Retired Gen. James Jones said he expects two of the meetings to be held this week, but stressed that there is no target date to complete the review, which was prompted by McChrystal's recently reported assessment that the mission in Afghanistan would likely fail without 10,000 to 40,000 more troops.

The forthcoming meetings will begin with the assumption that the McChrystal strategy is correct, Jones said, adding that the president will "encourage freewheeling discussion" and that "nothing is off the table."

Meanwhile, the Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan has built a fundraising juggernaut that generates cash from suchan array of criminal rackets, donations, taxes, shakedowns and other schemes that U.S. and Afghan officials say it may be impossible to choke off the movement's money supply.

Obama administration officials say the single largest source of cash for the Taliban, once thought to be Afghanistan's booming opium trade, is not drugs but foreign donations. The CIA recently estimated that Taliban leaders received $106 million in the past year from donors outside Afghanistan.

Information for this article was contributed by Lori Hinnant of The Associated Press and by Bob Woodward and Craig Whitlock of The Washington Post.

Front Section, Pages 13, 20 on 09/27/2009

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