Insider's View of the Afghan Election

Hell hath no fury like a U.N. representative scorned—Peter Galbraith, who was the second-highest-ranking U.N. official in Afghanistan until being fired last week, took to the pages of The Washington Post today to criticize his former bosses at the U.N. for their handling of the nation’s recent elections. Galbraith frankly discusses his firing by Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon (along with requests not to talk to the press), and says that according to his research, as many as 30 percent of the votes that won the election for Hamid Karzai were fraudulent, indicative of a pervasive problem in Afghan politics. He calls the election, which was managed by Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission instead of the U.N., a “foreseeable train wreck” and, more worryingly, “the greatest strategic victory in eight years” for the Taliban. According to Galbraith, higher-ups at the U.N. instructed him and his staff not to release their findings or evidence of fraud.