Afghan vote count sparks feud in U.N.

Betsy Pisik

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/oct/11/afghan-vote-count-sparks-feud-in-un//print/

UNITED NATIONS | The abrupt firing of the top American in the U.N. mission in Afghanistan - before the last ballots in the August presidential election could be vetted - has turned into a verbal melee in which the head of the mission and his ousted deputy are loudly accusing each other of permitting fraud and hiding evidence.

The feud between Peter Galbraith and Kai Eide has not derailed the work of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), according to the United Nations, nor has it demoralized many of the 1,500 staffers who work on humanitarian, human rights and political issues.

But it has cast a darker cloud over the election process, with final results expected to be released Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the enmity between Mr. Galbraith and Mr. Eide is still smoldering.

"He is good in the humanitarian work and outreach," Mr. Galbraith said of his former boss, "but that is not true of his administration."

Other critics are harsher.

Anthony Cordesman, a military specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told a Washington audience recently that Mr. Eide "needs to be replaced as soon as possible."

"The U.N. effort under Kai Eide has been terribly managed," Mr. Cordesman said.

U.N. agencies and programs have been active in Afghanistan since it joined the world body in 1946. U.N. workers remained even while the Taliban ruled from 1996 to 2001. The mission has expanded several times over the years, but still centers around stability and development, with human rights, humanitarian assistance and political issues gaining prominence.

The Security Council created UNAMA after the fall of the Talibanas a civilian body tucked into the peacekeeping department. The mission - which works closely with U.S.-led forces - maintains a civilian profile and has a budget of about $170 million for the year ending June 2009. The mission has field offices in 34 provinces, and Afghans comprise about 80 percent of the mission's staffers.

UNAMA works with nongovernmental organizations to build physical infrastructure in a mountainous, nearly roadless country. The organization has tried to discourage farmers from planting poppies and to grow vegetables and fruit instead.

But Afghanistan remains firmly tethered at the bottom of U.N. quality-of-life rankings.

Critics say the international community as a whole has done a poor job of building Afghan civil institutions since the Taliban was toppled.

Mr. Cordesman, speaking at the Nixon Center, said the aid effort had been poorly coordinated, that too much money spent by charitable groups goes to "overhead and corruption" and that the Afghan civil service, instead of being reinstituted, "has disappeared and become translators and drivers."

Mr. Cordesman also said it was a mistake to try to create an "instant democracy" in Afghanistan, a country that had a period of peace as a monarchy followed by three decades of foreign occupation, insurgency and civil war.

Much of the criticism of UNAMA focuses on the Aug. 20 elections.

Mr. Galbraith has accused Mr. Eide of trying to hide U.N. findings that tens of thousands of ballots counted by Afghan authorities were never actually cast.

He says he was fired from his UNAMA post because he confronted his boss about openly favoring incumbent President Hamid Karzai and asking staff members to cover up fraud.

"It has gotten very personal," said Edmond Mulet, the assistant secretary-general for peacekeeping operations, which oversees UNAMA. "There was no way they could continue to work together."

Mr. Eide waited until Thursday to respond. He issued a four-paragraph statement rejecting Mr. Galbraith's allegations as "patently false."

"Over the past days, the United Nations and I have endured repeated attacks in the media," Mr. Eide said. "I intend to deal openly with all these allegations against the U.N. and myself relating to fraud and bias at the appropriate time."

Well before the Aug. 20 vote, U.S. election observers warned U.N. officials in Kabul that it would be nearly impossible to have a legitimate election without a prior census and voter registration.

Unlike the elections in 2004, which were run by the United Nations, Afghans organized the 2009 election with limited support from the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations.

Under Afghan law, two panels were responsible for conducting the elections, counting the votes and discarding fraudulent ballots.

The Independent Election Commission (IEC) set the rules, while the Election Complaints Commission (EEC) is dealing with 2,500 documented complaints.

The five EEC commissioners were selected by prominent Afghans and international advisers. The IEC's 10 commissioners were chosen by Mr. Karzai.

The IEC announced an initial count last month that gave nearly 55 percent of the votes to Mr. Karzai and 28 percent to his top challenger, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah. A runoff would be required if Mr. Karzai gets less than 50 percent of the vote, although it would be difficult to have another election before the spring. The Washington Times has reported that the international community is preparing for another Karzai term no matter the final tally.

U.N. officials have quietly tried to undermine Mr. Galbraith in background briefings with the political and peacekeeping specialists and by slipping reporters articles that challenge Mr. Galbraith's credibility.

One official gave The Times a copy of a 16-year-old Newsweek profile of Mr. Galbraith, then the Clinton administration's ambassador to Croatia, accusing him of allowing Iran to sell arms to Bosnian Muslims despite an international arms embargo.

The article also comments on Mr. Galbraith's media skills.

Mr. Galbraith has given dozens of interviews since he returned home to Vermont last month, challenging Mr. Eide's credibility.

He has asserted that five UNAMA staff members will quit their jobs because they didn't want to work without him.

Mr. Mulet denied this.

"Only one person left because of Galbraith, and that was his personal assistant," Mr. Mulet said. "There are always routine comings and goings" of staff moving to different jobs or leaving the country, he said.

As for UNAMA as a whole, Mr. Mulet said, it was "just fine" despite Mr. Galbraith's expulsion.

Mr. Mulet said Mr. Galbraith's criticisms haven't resonated with most UNAMA staffers, who are preoccupied with trying to do their jobs despite car bombs and other attacks on foreigners in a country that has always been wary of outsiders.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has repeatedly affirmed his "full confidence" in Mr. Eide and said that he authorized the Norwegian to fire his deputy "in the best interests of the mission."

The Obama administration Friday added its endorsement.

"The United States fully supports United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) and Special Representative Kai Eide in UNAMA's oversight of and support for Afghanistan's election processes on behalf of the world community," the State Department said in an e-mail late Friday afternoon.

"We are in close cooperation with UNAMA and Ambassador Eide, and believe that the agency and its leadership have shown sound judgment in the conduct of their mission."

Barbara Slavin contributed to this report from Washington.

Another U.N. scandal

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/s_647123.html

The United Nations' ouster of its No. 2 official in Afghanistan portends yet another fraud that Turtle Bay is far more willing to condone than confront.

It's also another despicable U.N. mission creep from the world body's goal, which in this case supposedly is to help ensure the integrity of Afghanistan's presidential election.

Preliminary results showed President Hamid Karzai won the majority of the Aug. 20 vote. But former Deputy Envoy Peter Galbraith, an American, charges that the U.N. acted irresponsibly in handling claims of widespread voting fraud.

In a Sept. 28 letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, he writes that the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan couldn't overlook such irregularities without "becoming complicit in a cover-up."

Mr. Galbraith wanted a full investigation.

Instead, he got the boot.

This, after the U.N. reportedly channeled more than $220 million to enable the "election."

A U.N. spokesman in Afghanistan insists "now is not the time" to deal with such bothersome accusations. Instead, the U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission is conducting a partial recount, which some observers expect will hand the election to Mr. Karzai and a corruption-ridden government.

Once again, it's the agenda that matters most at Turtle Bay, not necessarily the reality of a given situation — whether it's a bogus vote in Afghanistan or the junk science of global warming.

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE NOON BRIEFING

BY MICHELE MONTAS,

SPOKESPERSON FOR THE SECRETARY-GENERAL

UN HEADQUARTERS, NEW YORK

Friday, October 8, 2009

CONFERENCE MANAGEMENT DEPARTMENT AGREES WITH INTERNAL WATCHDOG’S FINDINGS: In response to questions about a news report on the Department of General Assembly and Conference Management (DGACM), the Department says that the Office for Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) evaluation to which the news report refers was carried out at DGACM's request. The Department says it is largely in agreement with the findings contained in the report. As stated in the news report, the Department says it "does not share the pessimistic tone and tenor of the report regarding the very existence of integrated global management." It says visible progress is underway. The Department notes improvements, which are mentioned in the OIOS evaluation on page 7 but which the news report chose to ignore Furthermore, the Department is currently examining how best to implement the recommendations contained in the report.

At UN, Rebellion and Retaliation in Political Affairs Unit, Pascoe's Transfer Questioned, Faces French - Obama Switch?

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, October 8 -- The UN Department of Political Affairs, charged with working internationally for peace, has devolved into some internal warfare. On October 8, DPA chief B. Lynn Pascoe wrote an angry "note to file" about two of his directors, who rebelled against what many of Inner City Press' sources in DPA call a flawed and even corrupt hiring process.

As Mr. Pascoe's Note to File about "Unacceptable Conduct by Messrs. Martinovic and Heitmann" has it, "a P5 level staff member in my office volunteered for the internal mobility exercise. I reviewed the Vacancy Announcement that was posted for the P5 in the Subsidiary Organs [of the Security Council] Branch, and I deemed that she was qualified for the post."

There was only one problem: public notice of this P5 post has already been published, and three candidates from outside the UN had already applied. They were told that a test would be administered to make the process competitive and merit-based. Then they were told that the examination was canceled "for technical reasons."

One of the suddenly disqualified finalists, from Germany, came to New York and demanded of Mr. Aleksandar Martinovic to know what these "technical reasons" were. Another internal candidate, already expert on sanctions, was also sidelined by Mr. Pascoe's unilateral decision to place his colleague Michelle Griffin into the vacant P5 post, effective October 20, 2009.

Returning to Mr. Pascoe's disciplinary version, after he "issued a note to all DPA staff announcing the move, plus one other transfer, on 2 October, 2009" suddenly Mr. Martinovic and Horst Heitmann, the head of the Security Council Division, informed Mr. Pascoe's Special Assistant Karin Ann Gerlach that "they no longer required the post, did not need the staff member I had laterally re-assigned."

This was a protest of Mr. Pascoe's circumvention of an already begun recruitment process, sources tell Inner City Press. But rather than reconsider his actions, challenged by two respected directors in DPA, Pascoe fired off a note to their personnel files, calling it a "direct contravention of... the instructions I issued as head of the Department... unacceptable conduct for senior managers."

For the head of the UN Secretariat's main diplomatic unit to resort to managing his directors by vituperative notes to personnel files strikes some as a bad sign.

Less documented than the above but not entirely unrelated, well placed sources in the UN say that the United States is mulling taking over the Department of Peacekeeping Affairs, thereby displacing its current chief Alain Le Roy, but in exchange giving DPA to Le Roy's native France. They noted, however, that India too is making a claim to the Peacekeeping post. Watch this site.

UN's Pascoe and a retributed director who protested Pascoe's autocratic rule

While there is no mechanism, it appears, for a "note to the personnel file" of Mr. Pascoe, his circumvention of an already begun recruitment exercise, disregard for the protests of two long time directors, and notes to their files do not reflect well on him. Pascoe concludes, "I have asked Mr. [Haile] Menkerios to duly note this incident on both e-PAS' for the 2009/10 cycle."

Mr. Menkerios is known as Pascoe's "go-to" guy for African issues, totally sidelining Pascoe's predecessor as DPA chief Ibrahim Gambari. But with Menkerios reportedly up to replace Rodolphe Adada in Darfur, will he continue as the e-PAS hatchet man against two of his directors?

A month ago, Inner City Press posed a simple question to DPA and its spokesman, about a hiring process. It took more than three weeks to get it answered, and even then, only partially. While that story is finally in preparation, the report above, supported by two documents with Mr. Pascoe's signature, does not require any three week wait. Pascoe's note to file says "they will have an opportunity to respond in writing should they wish." So, on that or Pascoe's response, we have have more. Watch this site.

Footnote: On October 8, the day Pascoe signed the above quoted note to file, Inner City Press asked him questions on the record about both Somalia and Guinea. On the former, both on and off camera, Pascoe presented himself as unaware of the specifics of the United States' curtailment of aid to the UN World Food Program due to questions about the applicability of anti-terrorism laws to aid in the Al Shabaab controlled portions of Somalia. Video here from Minute 7:47.

On the latter, Pascoe expressed outrage about the rapes in Guinea, and said he hoped for an election, to which the UN would provide help. Video here, from Minute 11:29.

Hopefully clearer than in Afghanistan.

Then Inner City Press obtained a copy of Pascoe's note to file, which seems an equally or more accurate reflection of current DPA diplomacy.

'Reform' Is Just a Word at the U.N., Its Own Investigation Shows

Friday , October 09, 2009

By George Russell

How good is the United Nations at reforming itself?

Not good at all, according to a lengthy study this year by U.N. investigators of a grandiose, five-year effort to streamline and coordinate the performance of a $778 million U.N. bureaucracy that is supposed to do what diplomats like to do best: hold meetings.

According to the report, the bureaucracy’s reform effort so far has been a near-total failure.

Distributed to U.N. members in advance of the September opening of the General Assembly, the 24-page evaluation report was prepared by members of the U.N.’s watchdog Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS).

After four months spent studying a much-touted “Integrated Global Management Initiative,” intended to improve the performance of the sprawling U.N. conference bureaucracy, the OIOS inspectors declared that they had discovered “no progress or change” in how the organization was able to allocate money and staff around the world.

Nor could the investigators discover any cost savings as a result of the global reform effort. In fact, the report says, “no attempt has been made to track any savings or efficiency gains.”

Nor, the report continued, was there any evidence that successive top U.N. managers had done much to change the situation. They had not, for example, created “mechanisms for coordination and alignment” that would hold managers to account for failing to make the system work better and more coherently.

Just as disturbingly, the inspectors declared that they were “unable to vouch for the accuracy and veracity of data” given to them by the conference bureaucracy for evaluation.

The investigators added that in some cases, records that could be used to compare the delivery of conference services had been “compromised” through “retrospective adjustment.”

Translation: someone apparently fiddled with the books.

CLICK HERE FOR THE OIOS REPORT

The apparently immovable bureaucracy in the line of fire is known as the U.N. Secretariat’s Department of General Assembly and Conference Management (DGACM), a sprawling apparatus of some 2,100 people headquartered in New York City and in outlying “duty stations” in Geneva, Vienna and Nairobi.

DGACM is the plumbing of the U.N. system. Its mandate, according to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’sproposed budget for 2010-2011, is to provide “technical support and authoritative advice” as well as “high-quality conference servicing support” — including the publication of rooms full of documents as well as translation services — for all meetings held under U.N. auspices at the headquarters and the three major outlying offices, and elsewhere.

The meetings can range from the grand opera of General Assembly openings, like the session that recently began in New York, to relatively small and out-of-the-way gatherings of experts defining arcane formulas for carbon sequestration.

By 2008 alone, the inspection report says, a boggling array of some 219 different “entities” were included in the department’s formal worldwide conference calendar — a total that by no means exhausts the number of other U.N. bodies that are busy creating and conducting meetings of their own..

DGACM’s share, however, is the U.N.’s centerpiece. On average, over the four years ending in 2008, the inspectors reported, DGACM “planned and serviced” more than 21,300 meetings annually — mainly through a process in which the much larger U.N. headquarters and its three field offices did not coordinate their efforts, move personnel around to meet anticipated demand, or for much of their time use scheduling systems that could even communicate well with each other.

All of that was supposed to change as a result of the “Integrated Global Management Initiative” — except that, after five years of the initiative, at a cost that the evaluation report does not reveal, the inspectors declared it hadn’t.

The Global Initiative got underway in 2004, after years of repeated U.N. General Assembly resolutions urging greater integration of the conference services. (At the time, DGACM’s No. 2 was a German national, Angela Kane; she is now the U.N.’s Undersecretary-General for Management. Questions from FOX News to Kane about the origins of the Initative were not answered.)

The first effort of the Initiative was to spawn nine separate DGACM task forces, which chewed things over for about two years as they agreed that the bureaucracy should assemble a “compendium of administrative policies, practices and procedures” across the worldwide system — a complete picture of how the global bureaucracy actually worked.

The idea was that the compendium would be a “living document” that would allow different branches of the conference bureaucracy to alter their procedures in order to work better together. The compendium took two years to put together, from 2005 to 2007.

And when it was done, it could hardly be called “living.” According to the OIOS investigators, rather than a road map to change, the compendium became an encyclopedia of stasis: it merely enumerated differences in the way the bureaucracy worked in New York, Geneva, Nairobi and Vienna, without any subsequent pressure for change in anything. “Inexplicably,” the OIOS evaluation notes, “some staff were unaware of its existence.”

Instead, reform lurched off in a new direction at the suggestion of a consulting firm in 2006: creation of three separate information technology projects, known collectively as the Integrated Conference Management system, the cost of which is not mentioned in the OIOS report.

The three systems were intended to integrate conference statistics, meeting planning and documentation processing, and according to the report, consumed “much time and energy.” So far, however, none of the elaborate info-tech systems has been completed.

The outcome: after five years of effort, DGACM still does not have centralized information about its operations, lacks integrated softwear to schedule meetings or allocate staff on a global basis, and does not appear to be anywhere near a software solution for its document processing and planning needs

The OIOS inspectors noted acidly that “an inordinate amount of time has been spent on discussions about the relative merits of off-the-shelf hardware versus customization and in-house versus external information technology expertise, resulting in a diversion of efforts to deal with the underlying substance of workflow practices.” In short, “a waste of both resources and time.”

In one of the few attempts at irony in the densely worded documents, the OIOS authors note that one possibility for the fizzle is that “no doubt the five-year period of observation is fairly short relative to the complex changes that have occurred in the Department arena.”

The main reason for the lack of results, however, is a deeper problem: The U.N. Secretariat, despite its constant invocations of global reform, doesn’t seem to want things to be different. Neither the U.N. Secretary General nor his top managers, the report notes, have removed some fundamental obstacles to change in what the report calls DGACM’s “dual-governance arrangement.”

At the heart of the problem is the fact that while the head of the conference bureaucracy in New York is responsible for the huge overall budget of the conference department, the investigators say, the authority for how the funds are spent outside of headquarters remains with the heads of the Geneva, Nairobi and Vienna offices.

The announced 2010-2011 budgetary spending in those three outlying offices amounts to about $325 million — or about 42 percent of the global total. The offices also have about 47 percent of the global conference staff.

(The $778 million total figure for the entire conference department includes “regular,” “extrabudgetary” and “shared” spending. Under the normal U.N. rules for cost sharing, the U.S. would be responsible for 22 percent of the so-called “regular” two-year budget that forms most of that total, or about $147 million, as well as undetermined parts of the rest.)

In other words, there is no incentive for the bureaucracy outside New York City to change its ways. Indeed, the report says, many staffers at the conference bureaucracy’s outlying offices see their different ways of doing things “as an insurmountable obstacle” to exactly the kind of reform the organization claims to seek.

Ban Ki-moon himself has most recently kept the “dual-governance arrangement” in place.

As recently as March 2009 — around the same time that the OIOS evaluation of the conference bureaucracy began — Ban announced the reorganization of the U.N.’s Nairobi office in a bulletin that kept the decentralized “management challenge,” as the OIOS report puts it, as the basis for the office’s operations.

Nonetheless, in a document to the General Assembly dated July 19, 2009, entitled “Pattern of Conferences,” Ban declared that his conference department in 2008 had “pushed ahead” in the “implementation of its reform process.”

The same document also said it was “largely in agreement” with the evaluation of that reform carried out by OIOS — then began a lengthy rebuttal by adding that it “does not share the pessimistic tone and tenor of the report regarding the very existence of integrated global management having only a marginal effect.”

Ban’s report claimed that two of the three information technology projects were either being “pursued energetically” or had “advanced considerably.” The document planning project, Ban admitted, had “encountered challenges” and “would require further redesigning and implementation in 2010.”

Ban’s document further says that in 2008 “the head of the [conference] department began to exercise more deliberately and forcefully the mandate” to direct the use of his bureaucracy’s huge resources, even without the “attribution of direct managerial authority” to do so.

Meantime, the much touted Integrated Global Management Initiative is still supposedly chugging ahead, through the tangled and expensive world of U.N. conferences.

George Russell is executive editor of Fox News

Afghans Criticize UN Role In Presidential Vote

RADIO FREE EUROPE - RADIO LIBERTY

http://www.rferl.org/content/Afghans_Criticize_UN_Role_In_Presidential_Vote/1846603.html

EU envoy Kai Eide helping celebrate World Peace Day in Kabul in mid-September

October 08, 2009

KABUL -- A group of political activists in Afghanistan have called for transparency in the electoral process and urged the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) to stay unbiased in the process, RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan reports.

The activists, who are supporters of presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah, gathered in front of UNAMA offices in Kabul and delivered a letter criticizing Kai Eide, the UN's special representative to Afghanistan.

The letter accused Eide of "meddling in the internal affairs of Afghanistan."

UNAMA did not respond to the criticism.

But UNAMA spokeswoman Nilab Mubarez told Radio Free Afghanistan that UNAMA is not supporting any particular candidate in the Afghan presidential election but is supporting the electoral process in general.

Preliminary results showed incumbent President Hamid Karzai with slightly more than 50 percent of the vote, but amid claims of widespread fraud.

The final result is expected to be announced soon after investigations by Electoral Complaint Commission have been resolved and a partial recount of suspicious ballots has been completed.

Top UN envoy rebuffs accusations of impartiality in Afghan polls

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=32458&Cr=afghan&Cr1=

Kai Eide, Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Afghanistan

8 October 2009 – Rejecting “unacceptable” media accusations ranging from impartiality in Afghanistan’s presidential election process to fraud concealment, the top United Nations envoy to the South Asian nation today reiterated his resolve to do all he can to ensure that a final outcome to the polls is determined.

“My silence is now being exploited, to a point where these allegations are impeding the ongoing election process,” Kai Eide, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative, said in a statement.

“I have been motivated by my determination to make every effort to bring the election process to a conclusion,” he added.

The audit of suspicious ballot boxes being carried out by the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) and Independent Election Commission (IEC), in the presence of monitors and candidates’ representatives, is nearing an end.

“We need to allow both these bodies, which were created under the laws of this country, to conclude their investigations, identify fraud, and deliver a credible result in the next few days,” Mr. Eide, who also heads the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), said.

The mission reported yesterday that just over 100 of the 358 suspicious ballot boxes remain to be examined by the auditing process, with the remaining boxes slated to be inspected today.

The Special Representative also underscored in today’s statement that “the accusations that the United Nations has covered up or that I asked for fraud to be covered up are patently false,” adding that he plans to deal with these allegations “at the appropriate time.”

The world body, he said, is mandated by the Security Council to support the election process but not to interfere in it. “This has been, and remains, the basis of all my efforts.”

Yesterday, UN officials stressed that the envoy has only ever sided with electoral institutions in the country’s recent presidential ballot, and never with any of the candidates.

In recent days, former Deputy Special Representative Peter Galbraith has accused Mr. Eide of favouring incumbent Afghan President Hamid Karzai in the run-up to and after the country’s 20 August election by allowing voting irregularities to occur.

“What Kai Eide did, what he was supposed to do and what he did very faithfully, is side with the institutions,” a Director of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), Wolfgang Weisbrod-Weber, told reporters yesterday in New York.

“He was always keen and he still is keen to let the institutions work out the process,” said Mr. Weisbrod-Weber, who runs the Asia and Middle East Division of DPKO.

In the preparations for the election and in the aftermath, Mr. Eide has been dedicated to strengthening the ECC and IEC – especially regarding the rules and regulations governing the ballot – to make it as credible as possible, said Mr. Weisbrod-Weber.

Assistant-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Edmond Mulet said yesterday that Mr. Galbraith made “all sorts of assertions that were not true and that are completely out of bounds with our mandate in UNAMA regarding the election.”

Mr. Mulet added that Mr. Galbraith wanted to close 1,500 of the 6,900 polling stations in volatile regions, a measure that would disenfranchise a large number of potential voters. The Government decided to close down 500 of the stations.

He also proposed to annul the elections and set up a transitional government, said Mr. Mulet. “The fact that he was proposing this unconstitutional change and establishing a de facto government in Kabul was one of the elements that convinced us that he was not the right person to be in UNAMA at this point.”

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recalled Mr. Galbraith from Afghanistan at the end of September, terminating his appointment with UNAMA.

In a related development, Mr. Eide strongly condemned today’s suicide attack near the Indian Embassy in the Afghan capital, Kabul, the fifth such explosion in the city since August. According to media reports, at least 12 people have been killed, with dozens injured.

News Tracker: past stories on this issue

Senior UN officials deny accusations of favouritism in Afghan presidential polls

Forest scheme rings warning bells

http://en.cop15.dk/news/view+news?newsid=2285

UN's program to cut carbon emissions by paying poor countries to preserve their forests – called REDD – is open to wide abuse, Interpol environment crimes specialist warns.

International police, politicians and conservationists warn that the UN scheme that the climate negotiations are about to set up to transfer around 30 billion dollars a year from rich countries to owners of endangered forests may be impossible to monitor and may lead to fraud.

The UN agrees there is a "high risk" of abuse in the scheme called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD).

Peter Younger, Interpol environment crimes specialist and author of a new report for the World Bank on illegal forestry, says to the Guardian:

"Alarm bells are ringing. It is simply too big to monitor. The potential for criminality is vast and has not been taken into account by the people who set it up…Organized crime syndicates are eyeing the nascent forest carbon market. I will report to the bank that REDD schemes are open to wide abuse," he says and adds:

"Carbon trading transcends borders. I do not see any input from any law enforcement agency in planning REDD."

Hans Brattskar, director of the forest and climate programme in Norway that financially backs the program, says: "It will be extremely difficult to make it work. Law enforcement is vital because the corruption issues are very real. But we have to put in safeguards and we have to try. REDD can save up to 20 percent of all the world's emissions."

One of the countries most in favor of REDD, Papua New Guinea, last month suspended the climate change minister after allegations that fake carbon credits had been handed out to communities to persuade them to sign up to forest protection schemes.

Tina Vahanen, a senior officer at UN-REDD Programme, agrees the scheme is open to abuse:

"Where countries are corrupt the potential for REDD corruption is dangerous. [In Papua New Guinea], people have tried to take advantage of the market in an unacceptable way and carbon cowboys are trying to get the benefits. We can expect more of this as REDD develops," she says.

United Nations Certified Elections in Afghanistan

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SHOULD THE WORLD TRUST BAN KI MOON ?

SHOULD THE WORLD TRUST THE U.N.'s ELECTORAL ASSISTANCE DIVISION ?

Click here if you have any doubt about UN's roles in Afghanistan !

Afghan watchdog alters vote recount after criticism

http://www.reuters.com/article/asiaCrisis/idUSISL341008

(For more on Afghanistan, click on [ID:nAFPAK])

By Peter Graff

KABUL, Oct 7 (Reuters) - The U.N.-backed watchdog overseeing a fraud investigation in Afghanistan's Aug. 20 vote altered its ballot-counting rules on Wednesday, ditching a plan criticised for favouring President Hamid Karzai.

The new recount rules, which watchdog officials said were a "clarification", take into account the possibility one candidate may have disproportionately benefitted from fraud, a finding that would be necessary in order for Karzai to be forced to face a second round.

The Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC), mainly appointed by the United Nations, has ordered a recount of ballot boxes it deemed suspicious -- around 12 percent of the total -- after finding "clear and convincing evidence of fraud".

To speed it up, officials are sampling 10 percent of those suspicious boxes.

Preliminary results gave Karzai 54.6 percent of the vote. If the fraud investigation reduces his share below 50 percent, he would face a run-off against his main challenger, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah.

For that to happen, the commission would have to find fraud overwhelmingly benefitted Karzai, which the president denies.

Under rules the ECC announced on Monday, such a finding would have been unlikely, because the commission said it would eliminate the same percentage of votes for all candidates from groups of ballots that were suspicious for the same reason.

On Wednesday, it issued new guidelines, which specify a separate percentage of fraudulent ballots would be calculated for each candidate, so candidates who benefitted more from fraud would face a greater penalty.

Diplomats say about 75 percent of the ballots in the suspicious group were cast for Karzai. Karzai's opponents say his share of the fraud may have been far greater, because most of the fraud took place in the south, where he won overwhelming support.

Under Monday's rules, more than 1 million ballots could be found to be fraudulent and Karzai would still win in a single round. Under the revised rules, Karzai could potentially face a second round if as few as 520,000 votes are disqualified.

KARZAI SAYS FRAUD EXAGGERATED

Karzai says the extent of fraud has been exaggerated by some Western officials and media. Officials expect the final outcome next week, with a second round at the end of October if needed.

ECC officials said the new rules amounted to a "clarification" of Monday's order, rather than a change. ECC official Scott Borden said the intent was always to calculate separate percentages for each candidate.

However, Borden and several other ECC officials, including the body's head, Grant Kippen, had told Reuters on Monday the same percentage would be applied to each candidate.

Asked by Reuters on Monday: "You are going to apply the same percentage to all of them, that's what you said today?", Kippen nodded and said: "Yep."

"We are trying to put some sort of number on it: 70 percent, 50 percent, 20 percent, etc. And then we will be looking at all of the votes that these candidates have received in that universe and we will be applying that percentage against the votes that these candidates received," he said.

The initial rules had attracted criticism. Peter Galbraith, a U.S. diplomat fired as deputy head of the Kabul U.N. mission for speaking out about fraud called them "not acceptable".

"It cannot be correct to treat all presidential candidates equally for disqualification of ballots, because there was not an equal opportunity for fraud," Galbraith told Reuters on Monday.

"Let's not mince words: there was one candidate who had control of the state apparatus." (Editing by Jonathon Burch and Jerry Norton) (For more Reuters coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan, see: here)

Washington Post: UN Data Indicates Massive Fraud in Afghan Election

Voice of America

http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-10-07-voa50.cfm

By VOA News
07 October 2009

A major U.S. newspaper says confidential U.N. data on Afghanistan's disputed presidential election show the official vote count in some provinces exceeded the estimated number of voters by more than 100,000.

UN envoy to Afghanistan, Kai Eide (file photo)

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that a U.N. spreadsheet kept secret by the U.N. chief envoy in Afghanistan, Kai Eide, showed widespread discrepancies between estimated turnout and the final vote tally.

These discrepancies were especially prevalent in the volatile southern and eastern provinces, where Afghan President Hamid Karzai won with large margins. For example, the Independent Election Commission recorded about 135,000 votes from southern Helmand province, but the U.N. estimated that only 5,000 to 38,000 people there voted.

A U.N. spokesman in Kabul contacted by VOA Wednesday did not dispute the authenticity of the data, but said it is unsubstantiated raw data and should be treated accordingly.

The U.N. data from the August 20 election also indicates fraud by followers of candidate Abdullah Abdullah but on a much smaller scale.

Independent monitors have said one third of all ballots are suspicious.

Peter Galbraith (file photo)

Peter Galbraith, the top U.S. official with the United Nations mission to Afghanistan who was removed from his post last month, said Sunday he was repeatedly ordered not to pursue fraud reports.

Galbraith said U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon removed him not over a disagreement about how to handle reports of fraud, but over whether the U.N. should publicly address it.

He said he learned in July that at least 1,500 of the nearly 7,000 polling centers were located in places so insecure that Afghan election officials and security forces had never even visited them.

Galbraith added that these sites produced hundreds of thousands of phony votes for Mr. Karzai, who appointed all seven members of the ballot-counting Independent Election Commission.

United Nations officials in New York said Wednesday that Galbraith was fired from the U.N. mission because of an "accumulation of circumstances" that showed he was not the right person for the job.

Assistance Secretary General for Peacekeeping Operations Edmond Mulet said those included Galbraith's proposal to address election fraud by annulling the elections and setting up a transitional government. Mulet said such an action would be "completely out of bounds" with the United Nations mandate in Afghanistan.

Afghan election officials say workers are recounting some of the ballots from the presidential election and expect to formally declare a winner by late next week.

Unofficial tallies indicate Mr. Karzai leads with about 54 percent of the vote. If his lead dips below 50 percent, he could face top challenger Abdullah Abdullah in a runoff.

U.N. Data Show Discrepancies in Afghan Vote

By Colum Lynch and Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, October 7, 2009

UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 6 -- Voter turnout data kept confidential by the United Nations' chief envoy in Kabul after Afghanistan's disputed August presidential election show that in some provinces the official vote count exceeded the estimated number of voters by 100,000 or more, providing further indication that the contest was marred by fraud.

In southern Helmand province -- where 134,804 votes were recorded, 112,873 of them for President Hamid Karzai -- the United Nations estimated that just 38,000 people voted, and possibly as few as 5,000, according to a U.N. spreadsheet obtained by The Washington Post.

The disclosure of the data seems likely to worsen a credibility crisis for the U.N. special envoy, Kai Eide, who is already facing allegations that he sided with Karzai. In the past week, two U.N. political officers in Kabul have resigned because of a lack of confidence in Eide's leadership, according to U.N. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel issues.

The departures were triggered by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's decision last week to fireEide's American deputy, Peter W. Galbraith, after he accused his boss of failing to provide Afghan and international officials with evidence of fraud, primarily by Karzai's supporters.

Galbraith pressed Eide to turn over to international monitors the United Nations' estimated turnout data, which indicated that many fewer voters cast ballots in certain provinces than the number of votes recorded by election officials. Galbraith said Eide refused to share this data with the internationally led Electoral Complaints Commission once it became clear that the information reflected poorly on Karzai.

In an interview last week, Eide acknowledged withholding the data, saying that the information could not be verified and that he required a formal request in order to share it. He said he was confronted by a "confusing situation" in which "a lot of information was coming from sources that had their own agenda. We can't just hand over a bunch of information if we haven't made a solid assessment of it."

Eide added that he "really feels offended" by allegations that he favored Karzai, saying he had taken a balanced approach that enjoyed the "unanimous" support of the international community.

The U.N. spreadsheet shows widespread discrepancies between turnout and results, particularly in the volatile southern and eastern provinces where Karzai won with large margins. There are also allegations of fraud by followers of Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai's main competitor, but on a lesser scale.

Diplomats in Kabul have previously referred to such discrepancies, but the U.N. data have not been publicly disclosed until now.

In Paktika province, for example, where Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission has reported that 212,405 valid votes were cast, including 193,541 for Karzai, the United Nations estimated that 35,000 voters turned out. In Kandahar province, which recorded 252,866 votes, including 221,436 for Karzai, the United Nations estimated that 100,000 people voted.

In several provinces won by Abdullah, the United Nations estimated a larger turnout than election officials recorded. In Balkh province, for example, the organization estimated that 450,000 people voted, while the results showed 297,557 votes, 46 percent of them for Abdullah.

Although the estimates in some cases include a broad range of possible turnout, Galbraith said it was important information to share with Afghan officials and international monitors. "I favored turning it over to the Electoral Complaints Commission," he said. "I think we did an excellent job at collecting data. . . . We collected it with the idea of assisting the Afghan legal party that was investigating fraud, but Kai opposed turning it over."

Dan McNorton, the U.N. spokesman in Kabul, did not challenge the authenticity of the spreadsheet, but he said it should be read with caution. "The information that you have is unsubstantiated raw data and should be treated as such," he said.

McNorton said the Afghan and U.N.-backed electoral institutions are carrying out a "robust and methodologically sound" audit of the suspect ballot boxes that will be completed by the end of the week. "To suggest that UNAMA has supported one particular candidate over another is ludicrous," he said, using the acronym for the U.N. mission in Afghanistan.

U.N. officials have accused Galbraith of seeking to overturn the Afghan constitution in his zeal to thwart Karzai's election victory, saying he sought to "disenfranchise" large numbers of potential Karzai voters by closing 1,500 of 6,900 polling stations in volatile regions in southern and southeastern Afghanistan that are populated by members of the president's Pashtun ethnic group.

Senior U.N. officials also asserted that Galbraith urged Eide in a meeting in early September to consider annulling the elections because of fraud, to convince Karzai and Abdullah to step aside, and to set up a transitional government headed by Ashraf Ghani, a former World Bank economist who finished in fourth place with 2.7 percent of the vote. Galbraith, according to these officials, offered to seek support for the plan from Vice President Biden.

"Here's a man, a U.N. representative, advocating an unconstitutional change of government," Vijay Nambiar, Ban's chief of staff, said of Galbraith. "Of course he was recalled. What would you have expected us to do?"

Galbraith declined to discuss the details of the meeting but said there had been no formal proposal for a new government or a mission to Washington. "It's a smoke screen to obscure the real issue, which was whether the U.N. should handle electoral fraud," Galbraith said. "There was no mission to Biden or anybody else because there was no plan to do this."

The disputed election results have complicated the Obama administration's efforts to persuade a skeptical American public of the need to prosecute a war on behalf of Karzai's government.

"There is nothing more important this year than the legitimacy and credibility of our Afghan partners," said J. Alexander Thier, director for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the U.S. Institute of Peace. "The deepening skepticism in the United States about the entire engagement rests upon the idea that we don't have a credible partner in Afghanistan."

U.N. officials on both sides of the debate say Karzai -- who secured 54.6 percent of the first-round vote -- is ultimately expected to win the election, even without the help of fraudulent votes. But the reports of massive fraud have cast a cloud over Karzai's candidacy in Afghanistan, and Abdullah has stoked those suspicions by accusing Eide of bias toward the president.

On Saturday, Karl W. Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, sought to bolster international support for the U.N.-backed election, telling a gathering of two dozen diplomats that the United States has full trust in Eide. "The U.S. Embassy has full confidence in UNAMA and its leadership," said Caitlin Hayden, a U.S. Embassy spokeswoman.

Edmond Mulet, the U.N. assistant secretary general for peacekeeping, also defended the envoy. "Kai has the full support of the secretary general and of the most important stakeholders, the member states, including the United States, and all the ambassadors and special envoys sitting in Kabul," he said.

But Galbraith has received backing from some rank-and-file staffers, including one former subordinate who said Galbraith "was highly popular among the staff."

"The environment had become very toxic," said Tracey Brinson, Galbraith's assistant in Kabul, who also plans to leave her job this month. "There is a lot of anger, a lot of resentment, sort of hurt feelings, and people are a little disillusioned about what they are doing."

Partlow reported from Kabul.

UN Denies Galbraith's a Whistleblower, Told Him to Be Quiet about Bias pro-Karzai

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, October 7 -- With the UN facing charges of bias and cover up of fraud in Afghanistan, Wednesday in New York the UN presented no fewer than three officials to the Press corps, all intent on rebutting and bad mouthing the UN's fired deputy envoy Peter Galbraith.

The Department of Peacekeeping Operation's second in command Edmond Mulet said the Galbraith has "personal motives" for going public with his complaints that main envoy Kai Eide has been covering up electoral irregularities in the service of Hamid Karzai. Inner City Press asked Mulet to describe how Galbraith has hired for the job, and why these personal motives, or propensity to be a loose cannon, had not been discovered at the time.

Mulet said that while Galbraith had been "a candidate among others... he was selected by the Secretary General... I cannot deny that him being a citizen of an important country that plays an important role in Afghanistan, that also was a factor we took into consideration." Video here, from Minute 1:01:56.

According to Mulet, the UN thought Galbraith's American citizenship was a plus, that Galbraith would somehow represent or be a conduit to the United States. So what now -- does Galbraith speak for the U.S.? Or, as some surmise, did Richard Holbrooke create a Frankenstein and then "leave him out to dry"?

UN's Mulet and Spokesperson in past, Galbraith as whistleblower not shown

Inner City Press asked Mulet and his colleagues to respond to Galbraith's statement in the Daily Telegraph that

"the final instruction from the Secretary-General before sacking him last week was: 'Do not talk.' He initially agreed to Ban Ki-moon's request after being given assurances that his dismissal would be presented as a dispute over how the UN mission was handling electoral fraud in Afghanistan. But he decided to break his silence, after officials announced instead that his sacking was in the 'best interests of the mission.' 'I might have tolerated even this last act of dishonesty in a dispute dating back months if the stakes were not so high.'"

While Mulet didn't answer, his colleague Wolfgang Weisbrod-Weber, the Director of the Asia and Middle East Division of DPKO, said that while he didn't know what Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said, DPKO has told Galbraith "do not exacerbate the divergence of views in public unnecessarily."

Since Galbraith was complaining not only of electoral fraud but also of bias by his boss, Kai Eide, and was told to be quiet and then was fired, Inner City Press asked how this complied or relates to the UN's statement policy of protection of whistleblowers' rights to make such complaints. Video here, from Minute 1:04:14.

Mulet insisted that Galbraith is not a whistleblower, saying "he has a personal agenda, a person objective that will become clear in the future." Another reporter said that Ban's chief of staff Vijay Nambiar said that Galbraith was removed because he was trying to engineer an unconstitutional change of government in Afghanistan. There was no response to this, nor to Inner City Press' question about whether the UN will, as Karzai challenger Abdullah Abdullah and others have urged, conduct an investigation of Eide's actions, by the Office of Internal Oversight Services.

While Mulet and Craig Jenness, Director of the Electoral Assistance Division of the Department of Political Affairs both insisted that the UN had no monitoring role in Afghanistan, a May 11, 2009 press release by the UN statedthat "UNAMA will follow these elections closely and monitor the campaign to help ensure that the fundamental political rights of the Afghan people are respected. " So which is it? Watch this site.

What I really saw in the recent Afghan elections

http://www.chinapost.com.tw/commentary/washington-post/2009/10/05/227346/What-I.htm

Monday, October 5, 2009
By Peter W. Galbraith, Special to The Washington Post

Before firing me last week from my post as his deputy special representative in Afghanistan, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon conveyed one last instruction: Do not talk to the press. In effect, I was being told to remain a team player after being thrown off the team. Nonetheless, I agreed.

As my differences with my boss, Norwegian diplomat Kai Eide, had already been well publicized (through no fault of either of us), I asked only that the statement announcing my dismissal reflect the real reasons. Alain LeRoy, the head of U.N. peacekeeping and my immediate superior in New York, proposed that the United Nations say I was being recalled over a "disagreement as to how the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) would respond to electoral fraud." Although this was not entirely accurate -- the dispute was really about whether the U.N. mission would respond to the massive electoral fraud -- I agreed.

Instead, the United Nations announced my recall as occurring "in the best interests of the mission," and U.N. press officials told reporters on background that my firing was necessitated by a "personality clash" with Eide, a friend of 15 years who had introduced me to my future wife.

I might have tolerated even this last act of dishonesty in a dispute dating back many months if the stakes were not so high. For weeks, Eide had been denying or playing down the fraud in Afghanistan's recent presidential election, telling me he was concerned that even discussing the fraud might inflame tensions in the country. But in my view, the fraud was a fact that the United Nations had to acknowledge or risk losing its credibility with the many Afghans who did not support President Hamid Karzai.

I also felt loyal to my U.N. colleagues who worked in a dangerous environment to help Afghans hold honest elections -- at least five of whom have now told me they are leaving jobs they love in disgust over the events leading to my firing.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. Unlike the United Nations-run elections in 2004, this balloting was managed by Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission (IEC). Despite its name, the commission is subservient to Karzai, who appointed its seven members. Even so, the international role was extensive. The United States and other Western nations paid the more than US$300 million to hold the vote, and U.N. technical staff took the lead in organizing much of the process, including printing ballot papers, distributing election materials and designing safeguards against fraud.

Part of my job was to supervise all this U.N. support. In July, I learned that at least 1,500 polling centers (out of 7,000) were to be located in places so insecure that no one from the IEC, the Afghan National Army or the Afghan National Police had ever visited them. Clearly, these polling centers would not open on Election Day. At a minimum, their existence on the books would create large-scale confusion, but I was more concerned about the risk of fraud.

Local commission staff members were hardly experienced election professionals; in many instances they were simply agents of the local power brokers, usually aligned with Karzai. If no independent observers or candidate representatives, let alone voters, could even visit the listed location of a polling center, these IEC staffers could easily stuff ballot boxes without ever taking them to the assigned location. Or they could simply report results without any votes being in the ballot boxes.

Along with ambassadors from the United States and key allies, I met with the Afghan ministers of defense and the interior as well as the commission's chief election officer. We urged them either to produce a credible plan to secure these polling centers (which the head of the Afghan army had told me was impossible) or to close them down. Not surprisingly, the ministers -- who served a president benefiting from the fraud -- complained that I had even raised the matter. Eide ordered me not to discuss the ghost polling centers any further. On Election Day, these sites produced hundreds of thousands of phony Karzai votes.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.

Afghanistan is deeply divided ethnically and geographically. Both Karzai and the Taliban are Pashtun, Afghanistan's dominant ethnic group, which makes up about 45 percent of the country's population. Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai's main challenger, is half Pashtun and half Tajik but is politically identified with the Tajiks, who dominate the north and are Afghanistan's second largest ethnic group. If the Tajiks believe that fraud denied their candidate the chance to compete in a second round, they may respond by simply not recognizing the authority of the central government. The north already has de facto autonomy; these elections could add an ethnic fault line to a conflict between the Taliban and the government that to date has largely been a civil war among Pashtuns.

Since my disagreements with Eide went public, Eide and his supporters have argued that the United Nations had no mandate to interfere in the Afghan electoral process. This is not technically correct. The U.N. Security Council directed the U.N. mission to support Afghanistan's electoral institutions in holding a "free, fair and transparent" vote, not a fraudulent one. And with so much at stake -- and with more than 100,000 U.S. and coalition troops deployed in the country -- the international community had an obvious interest in ensuring that Afghanistan's election did not make the situation worse.

President Obama needs a legitimate Afghan partner to make any new strategy for the country work. However, the extensive fraud that took place on Aug. 20 virtually guarantees that a government emerging from the tainted vote will not be credible with many Afghans.

As I write, Afghanistan's Electoral Complaints Commission is auditing 10 percent of the suspect polling boxes. If the audit shows this sample to be fraudulent, the commission will throw out some 3,000 suspect ballot boxes, which could lead to a runoff vote between Karzai and Abdullah. By itself, a runoff is no antidote for Afghanistan's electoral challenges. The widespread problems that allowed for fraud in the first round of voting must be addressed. In particular, all ghost polling stations should be removed from the books ("closed" is not the right word since they never opened), and the election staff that facilitated the fraud must be replaced.

Afghanistan's pro-Karzai election commission will not do this on its own. Fixing those problems will require resolve from the head of the U.N. mission in Afghanistan -- a quality that so far has been lacking.

Peter W. Galbraith served as deputy special representative of the United Nations in Afghanistan from June until last week.