Massive Afghan poll audit begins

An Afghan election commission worker holds up a signed document from a ballot box during an audit of the presidential run-off votes at a counting centre in Kabul yesterday. Right: Officials investigate near the site of the car bomb attack at the north of Kabul International Airport in Kabul yesterday.

AFP/Kabul

Afghanistan yesterday began a massive audit of 8.1mn ballots cast in the run-off round of its controversial presidential vote, hours after a brazen Taliban raid on Kabul’s airport.

The audit is aimed at reversing a destabilising political crisis that has threatened to widen the country’s ethnic fissures as Nato winds down its deployment after more than a decade of war.

Some 23,000 ballot boxes are being transported by the Afghan army and Nato forces to the capital, where they will be examined at 100 verification stations.

“The audit will take two to three weeks, we are planning to form hundreds of teams for this audit,” Ahmad Yousuf Nuristani, chief of the Independent Election Commission told a press conference.

“I hope both candidates accept the results this time after the overall audit,” he added.

The move was agreed upon by the two rival presidential contenders, Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani, following a deal brokered by US Secretary of State John Kerry.

The impasse over the vote to succeed President Hamid Karzai has raised fears of a return to the ethnic violence of the 1990s. 

Abdullah — who says he already suffered one stolen election at Karzai’s hands in 2009 – is half-Tajik while Ghani is from the majority Pashtun community, as are the Taliban.

Every one of the 8.1mn votes cast in the run-off election will be checked for signs of fraud in a painstaking process in Kabul.

Nato’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) – whose main Kabul compound lies next to the civilian airport — is providing air transport for some 40% of the votes.

The deal followed weeks of fruitless diplomatic efforts and paves the way for a government of national unity, including a role for the losing side.

Auditing began just hours after Afghan security officials put an end to a Taliban siege of Kabul’s airport in the militants’ latest attempt to steal the initiative amid the power struggle.

Insurgents seized a building under construction at around 4:30am before opening fire with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades as explosions rang out.

The attack ended more than four hours later, according to the authorities.

Gul Agha Hashimi, a senior police official, said: “The attack is over, and the area is cleared from the insurgents. All the insurgents who were holed up in an under-construction building were killed.”

Civilian flights from the airport north of Kabul meanwhile were suspended.

ISAF and Afghan military helicopters were seen hovering over the area during the attack, which came after a devastating suicide bombing at a busy market in southeastern Paktika province on Tuesday that killed at least 42 people. Taliban militants claimed responsibility for yesterday’s attack. 

“A number of our mujahedeen armed with heavy and light weapons have launched an attack on Kabul International Airport,” the insurgents’ spokesman Zabiuhallah Mujahid said in a statement.

The Kabul airport is a prime target for insurgents. Militants destroyed Karzai’s parked helicopter and damaged three other choppers after firing rockets into the airport on July 3.