Peter Galbraith, Ousted UN Official, Says UN Failed To Prevent Afghan Election Fraud

(AP) WASHINGTON -- An American ousted as the No. 2 official at the U.N. mission in Afghanistan said Monday he has no second-thoughts about assertions that the organization failed to aggressively probe vote fraud charges in the August presidential election.

"The flaw that took place in Afghanistan was preventable," the dismissed diplomat, Peter Galbraith, said Monday on ABC's "Good Morning America."

Galbraith said the United Nations "did not exercise its responsibility." In dismissing Galbraith, the deputy envoy at the U.N. mission there, Secretary-General Ki-moon did not specify the nature of their differences.

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In a highly critical op-ed published in the Washington Post this weekend, Galbraith went into great detail about the failure of the U.N. to deal with voter fraud in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan's presidential election, held Aug. 20, should have been a milestone in the country's transition from 30 years of war to stability and democracy. Instead, it was just the opposite. As many as 30 percent of Karzai's votes were fraudulent, and lesser fraud was committed on behalf of other candidates. In several provinces, including Kandahar, four to 10 times as many votes were recorded as voters actually cast. The fraud has handed the Taliban its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United States and its Afghan partners.

The election was a foreseeable train wreck. [...]

At other critical stages in the election process, I was similarly ordered not to pursue the issue of fraud. The U.N. mission set up a 24-hour election center during the voting and in the early stages of the counting. My staff collected evidence on hundreds of cases of fraud around the country and, more important, gathered information on turnout in key southern provinces where few voters showed up but large numbers of votes were being reported. Eide ordered us not to share this data with anyone, including the Electoral Complaints Commission, a U.N.-backed Afghan institution legally mandated to investigate fraud. Naturally, my colleagues wondered why they had taken the risks to collect this evidence if it was not to be used.

In early September, I got word that the IEC was about to abandon its published anti-fraud policies, allowing it to include enough fraudulent votes in the final tally to put Karzai over the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff. After I called the chief electoral officer to urge him to stick with the original guidelines, Karzai issued a formal protest accusing me of foreign interference. My boss sided with Karzai.