“It is hard to see how a second round can be credible unless women’s security and access to the polls is dramatically improved,” said Rachel Reid, a researcher with Human Rights Watch in Kabul.
The Independent Election Commission, the Afghan body that runs elections, must also finalize the list of polling stations. Much of the fraud in the August balloting came through ballots that arrived from so-called “ghost polling stations” that never opened because they were in dangerous areas.
But closing the questionable stations would prevent voters in those areas from casting ballots. Kai Eide, the U.N. chief in Afghanistan, has said he worked to open the stations to avoid disenfranchising voters.
Abdullah said Wednesday that he is preparing a list of conditions that his team wants election organizers to commit to in order to have a fair vote. He said he would be open to negotiating the conditions, but would not accept an election organized on the same terms as the August vote.
“I will be flexible, but I will be serious about this because, after all, it is the transparency and fairness of the elections which will decide the outcome,” he said.
Karzai’s capitulation Tuesday was a relief to the Obama administration, which hopes the troubled nation has taken one step closer toward a credible, legitimate government necessary to win public support in the U.S. for the war and reverse Taliban gains.
The U.S. military reported one of its troops was killed in a bomb attack in the south Tuesday, bringing the total number of Americans killed in October to 30.
Karzai announced the decision Tuesday after a day of intensive talks with U.S. Sen. John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Later, in a telephone interview from Dubai with The Associated Press, Kerry described the evolution in Karzai’s thinking.
“President Karzai really deeply believes he had won the election and ... that the international community was kind of conspiring to push for a different outcome,” Kerry said. “He had people within his government, people within the election commission who felt they were being insulted about putting together a faulty election process.” “There were a lot of very deep feelings about Afghanistan’s right to run its election, its competency in running it,” Kerry said.
__ Associated Press Writer Todd Pitman contributed to this report.
AP-TK-21-10-09 1150GMT
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