KABUL, AFGHANISTAN — Days before the outcome of Afghanistan's contentious presidential vote was expected to be announced, the head of the United Nations mission in the country acknowledged Sunday that widespread electoral fraud had occurred.
But the official, Kai Eide, strongly contested allegations by his former deputy that he had engaged in a cover-up of vote-rigging by supporters of President Hamid Karzai. He also expressed confidence that a partial recount, carried out by Afghan officials and now under review by a U.N.-backed body, would yield an acceptable result.
Eide described the election as "a difficult process, marred by so many problems, not least . . . by widespread fraud." But he said oversight procedures laid out in Afghanistan's Constitution were meant to weed out invalid votes.
"There is a united international community behind this approach, and in my view, it is the only viable road to follow," he said at a news conference.
Eide's highly unusual public appeal was the latest twist in the bitter election dispute, which in turn comes against a backdrop of difficult deliberations by the Obama administration over whether to send 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan, as reportedly requested by Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. commander there. Republicans in Congress have been pressing President Obama to fulfill the request, while many congressional Democrats have questioned committing more troops to the cause.
The tainted election has been an enormous disappointment to Western powers, which had hoped that the Aug. 20 vote would provide a strong mandate to Afghanistan's central government and help galvanize a troubled war effort. Instead, wrangling over the results has heightened ethnic tensions and disillusioned many Afghans.
At his news conference, Eide offered his most detailed rebuttal yet of accusations put forth by veteran U.S. diplomat Peter W. Galbraith, his former deputy. Galbraith was fired by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon last month after the extent of his dispute with Eide, a Norwegian, became embarrassingly public.
Acknowledging that he and Galbraith had clashed over so-called ghost polling stations, Eide said many Afghans would have been unable to vote if he had followed his deputy's call to close a number of stations where the security situation would prevent observers from being present.
