Afghan candidates pull out of election audit

Afghan election workers sort ballots Wednesday in Kabul for an audit of runoff votes in the country’s troubled presidential election. Former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, saying the process is fraught with fraud, pulled his auditors from the recount Wednesday, and the other candidate, former Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, was asked to do likewise in the interest of fairness. Officials said the audit would proceed.
Afghan election workers sort ballots Wednesday in Kabul for an audit of runoff votes in the country’s troubled presidential election. Former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, saying the process is fraught with fraud, pulled his auditors from the recount Wednesday, and the other candidate, former Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, was asked to do likewise in the interest of fairness. Officials said the audit would proceed.

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Afghanistan's troubled presidential election was rocked by more turmoil Wednesday as both candidates vying to succeed Hamid Karzai pulled their observers out of a ballot audit meant to determine the winner of a June runoff.

First, Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister, pulled his monitors from the audit to protest the process that his team claims is fraught with fraud.

Then, the United Nations, which is helping supervise the U.S.-brokered audit, asked the other candidate, former Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, to also pull out his observers in the interest of fairness.

The U.N. team said the audit then proceeded without both candidates' teams.

The U.S. brokered the audit of the 8 million ballots from the presidential runoff as a way to end an impasse over the election results. But the audit has proceeded in fits and starts this summer as both sides argued over every ballot.

Abdullah came in first during the first round of voting in April but preliminary results from the June runoff showed Ahmadzai in the lead. That sparked accusations of rampant fraud from the Abdullah camp.

Ahmadzai's camp also alleged voting irregularities, and both sides agreed to the audit after a visit by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in July. It was decided that the process would be led by the U.N. and Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission, and observed by monitors from each candidate's campaign team.

On Tuesday, Abdullah's team threatened to boycott the audit if the team's concerns over fraud were not addressed. On Wednesday, it followed through on the threat and pulled observers from the recount, which is being carried out in warehouses on the edge of the capital, Kabul.

"It is full of fraud," Fazel Sancharaki, a spokesman for Abdullah, said after the pullout. "Nobody is paying attention to our demands."

After the move by the Abdullah camp, U.N. representative Nicholas Haysom said the U.N. asked the opposing side to assess whether they should participate in the audit as well and said Ahmadzai's camp later agreed to also pull out.

"The audit will now proceed to its conclusion," Haysom said. "We do not anticipate any significant disruption to the process going forward."

Abdullah has not spoken publicly since the boycott was announced. The campaign still has the option of sending observers back to the audit, and Haysom said the U.N. was ready to address concerns from either side.

Initially, Abdullah's team was concerned that not enough ballots had been invalidated to correspond to the level of fraud the team believes happened and asked that the criteria for invalidation be expanded.

The election impasse has hurt Afghanistan's economy, as citizens hold onto their money and investors put the brakes on new projects while they wait to see how the crisis unfolds. It also has delayed the signing of a new security pact with the United States that would allow a small number of troops to stay in Afghanistan past December, which Karzai has refused to sign.

Karzai met with the two candidates Sunday and again Tuesday. He insisted the inauguration of the new president must happen by Tuesday -- two days before NATO members are expected to meet in Wales.

Without a new president, it's unclear who would represent Afghanistan at a meeting that will discuss the military coalition's support for Afghan forces. A spokesman for Karzai, Aimal Faizi, said the president is not willing to go himself. Karzai has clashed with NATO over such issues as night raids and civilian casualties in airstrikes.

Afghanistan has faced a renewed Taliban insurgency this summer as the militants test Afghan forces who are fighting for the first time largely without international backup.

In the central Ghor province, Gov. Anwar Rahmati said Wednesday that local security forces were battling roughly 700 Taliban in the southern Pasaband district. Militants killed nine police officers and captured another 30, Rahmati said.

Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, who stepped down as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan on Tuesday, said the election stalemate has hurt progress in training the country's military.

He said the Taliban will continue to test the Afghan forces next year with an onslaught of fighters and attacks, hoping to capitalize on the dwindling U.S. and coalition troops in the country.

"If we have a good political transition, that will propel the Afghan forces into 2015," said Dunford, who is becoming the next commandant of the Marine Corps.

Information for this article was contributed by Lolita C. Baldor of The Associated Press.

A Section on 08/28/2014

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