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KABUL (AP) -- President Hamid Karzai's arch political rival agreed Wednesday to booty allotment in the Nov. 7 runoff election, cementing the stage for a high-stakes showdown in the face of Taliban threats and approaching winter snows.
Ex-Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah made his animadversion to reporters one day after Karzai bowed to intense U.S. and all-embracing pressure and accustomed findings of a U.N.-backed panel that there had been massive artifice on his behalf in the Aug. 20 vote. Those findings showed Karzai bootless to win the 50 percent appropriate to avoid a runoff.
As allotment of efforts to avert cheating in the upcoming ballot, acclamation admiral acquire accursed 200 commune acclamation chiefs following complaints by candidates or observers about misconduct in their regions, the U.N. said aftermost week. It was not immediately known how many posts in absolute there were.
The country's electoral crisis has comes as the Washington debates its way forward in a war that entered its ninth year this month.
Holding the second annular of polling as Afghanistan enters its winter season poses serious challenges, both for cartoon voters and distributing ballots nationwide, which the U.N. said would begin Thursday. Abdullah said U.S. and Afghan forces also charge provide security to prevent a repeat of a beachcomber of Taliban attacks in August that dead dozens. In some areas, militants cut off the ink-marked fingers of bodies who had voted.
Voters "are demography a risk in some parts of the country and they should be assured that that risk is worthwhile," said Abdullah, who said he called Karzai to acknowledge him for agreeing to hold the second-round! . "I wou ld like to see that our bodies are accommodating after an environment and atmosphere of fear and intimidation."
But he conceded security was far from perfect. "There are some circumstances that we cannot change in the coming 15 days, like areas which Taliban can abuse the people," Abdullah said.
Abdullah's acknowledgment sets the stage for an acclamation that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said would be a "huge challenge" to pull off after repeating the boundless artifice that marred the first-round balloting. The world anatomy has set aside added than $20 million to support the poll, according to the U.N. spokesman in Kabul, Aleem Siddique.
Finding replacements for acclamation workers implicated in artifice will be difficult. The government had to clutter this summer to recruit enough acclamation admiral and poll workers, abnormally at voting stations for women. It's unclear if they would be able to fill accessible posts with better-qualified people.
"It is hard to see how a second annular can be aboveboard 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 anatomy that runs elections, charge also agree the account of polling stations. Much of the artifice in the August balloting came through ballots that arrived from alleged "ghost polling stations" that never opened because they were in alarming areas.
But closing the ambiguous stations would prevent voters in those areas from casting ballots. Kai Eide, the U.N. arch in Afghanistan, has said he worked to accessible the stations to avoid disenfranchising voters.
Abdullah said Wednesday that he is preparing a account of conditions that his aggregation wants acclamation organizers to commit to in order to acquire a fair vote. He said he ! would be accessible to negotiating the conditions, but would not acquire an acclamation organized on the aforementioned terms as the August vote.
"I will be flexible, but I will be serious about this because, after all, it is the accuracy and candor 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 footfall afterpiece toward a credible, accepted government necessary to win public support in the U.S. for the war and reverse Taliban gains. The U.S. military appear one of its troops was dead in a bomb attack in the south Tuesday, bringing the absolute number of Americans dead in October to 30.
Karzai announced the accommodation Tuesday after a day of intensive talks with U.S. Sen. John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Later, in a blast interview from Dubai with The Associated Press, Kerry declared the evolution in Karzai's thinking.
"President Karzai really deeply believes he had won the acclamation and ... that the all-embracing community was affectionate of conspiring to push for a different outcome," Kerry said. "He had bodies aural his government, bodies aural the acclamation agency who felt they were being insulted about putting together a faulty acclamation process."
"There were a lot of very abysmal feelings about Afghanistan's appropriate to run its election, its competency in active it," Kerry said.
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Associated Press Writer Todd Pitman contributed to this report.
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