Karzai appoints new head for election commission

April 18, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

KABUL

President Hamid Karzai took key steps toward reforming the country’s electoral system Saturday, naming a respected former judge to head Afghanistan’s election-organizing body and backing down from a bid to keep international representatives off a separate team that monitors fraud.

The moves come after months of demands by the U.S. and its allies to clean up the electoral process following massive fraud in last year’s presidential balloting. Without meeting those demands, the Afghan government risked losing both funds for an upcoming parliamentary vote and broader international support.

Disagreements about how to handle last year’s fraud-marred presidential vote nearly derailed the U.S.-Afghan partnership, even as President Barack Obama was ordering thousands more U.S. troops to try to turn back the Taliban.Karzai also appointed three Afghans and two U.N. representatives to the separate, U.N.-backed watchdog group that uncovered the fraud in the Aug. 20 presidential election. The U.N. said it was now recommending that donor nations release money set aside to fund the parliamentary vote.

Last February, Karzai issued a presidential decree excluding foreigners from the watchdog. But the lower house of parliament threw out the decree.

The chief of the U.N. mission, Staffan de Mistura, said that with the changes, he believed the Sept. 18 parliamentary elections would be “more credible, more transparent” than the presidential election last year.

However, it’s unclear if Karzai has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing on the part of the officials he appointed to run last year’s election, at times even accusing the U.N. and international advisers of being behind the fraud. Those comments drew sharp rebukes from the White House and the United Nations.

The new chairman of the Independent Election Commission is Fazel Ahmed Manawi, an Islamic scholar who joined the opposition Northern Alliance after Kabul fell to the Taliban in 1996 and took part in talks to form a new government after the U.S.-led invasion drove them from power in 2001.

As an electoral commissioner last year, Manawi was not considered as closely tied to Karzai as his predecessor, Azizullah Lodin.

Karzai was proclaimed the winner after his top challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, dropped out of the runoff, saying he was not convinced the second ballot would be fairer than the first.

Also Saturday, two Dutch soldiers serving under NATO command were killed by a roadside bomb in southern Uruzgan province, the Netherlands’ Defense Ministry said. Another Dutch soldier was seriously wounded. The deaths bring to at least 23 the number of international troops killed so far this month.