Early Tally Favors Afghan Leader

Interim leader Hamid Karzai appeared set to become Afghanistan's first directly elected leader after preliminary results Sunday showed he had won a majority in landmark presidential elections.

However, his main rivals refused to concede. An expert panel is still reviewing their allegations of electoral fraud, and it will take several more days for an official announcement declaring the winner.

Karzai has received 4,240,041 votes, more than half of the estimated 8,129,935 valid votes cast in the Oct. 9 vote. He must get more than 50 percent to win the election outright and avoid a runoff against his closest challenger.

Some 7,666,529 valid votes — or 94.3 percent of the total — have been counted so far, with Karzai currently at 55.3 percent, 39.1 points ahead of his nearest rival, former Education Minister Yunus Qanooni.

Hamed Elmi, Karzai's campaign spokesman, said Sunday's figures confirmed optimism that the interim leader — who took power after the fall of the Taliban in late 2001 — would triumph when the final results are released.

"I'm going to see his excellency this evening to see when to start the celebrations," Elmi told The Associated Press. "We were up against 17 candidates, but the people were behind us. We will sleep soundly tonight."

But Karzai's rivals said they were reserving judgment pending the investigation.

"We are waiting for the international experts to decide on the fraud and cheating. Until then, we have nothing else to say," Taj Mohammed Wardak, Qanooni's running mate, told AP.

Ethnic Hazara chieftain Mohammed Mohaqeq, who is currently running third at 11.8 percent, also refused to concede.

"It's too early to judge the result now," he told AP.

The camp of another main rival, ethnic Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, currently fourth with 10.3 percent, said days ago that they accepted that Karzai was likely to win. But on Sunday, Dostum running mate Chafiga Habibi alleged continuing evidence of irregularities.

"We are waiting for the result of the investigation," she told AP. She said candidates would meet with the expert panel on Monday, and decide together whether they would accept the election results.

It is possible that more votes were actually cast than the current estimate, but barring a wildly incorrect projection on votes cast coupled with the near impossibility of all the remaining votes going to other candidates, any changes would not be enough to drop Karzai under the 50 percent mark.

The estimate of the total number of valid votes cast is based on a projection given by the joint U.N.-Afghan election board on its Web site of the total turnout, adjusted to deduct the forecast proportion of spoiled ballots.

Sultan Baheen, a spokesman for the election board, reiterated that it will not announce the official results until both the count and the investigations are complete.

"I hope it won't take too long — maybe two or three days more," he said.

Karzai has served as stopgap president since U.S. forces drove out the Taliban regime for harboring Osama bin Laden. Election victory would make him Afghanistan's first elected leader after a quarter century of war, and give him a five-year mandate.

Many Afghans are frustrated at the slow pace of their country's recovery. But Karzai is trusted as a bridge to foreign backers and has rounded up strong support in the cities and among fellow Pashtuns, the country's largest ethnic group.

Still, rivals have scored strongly among ethnic minorities in the north and center of the country, perpetuating the deep ethnic and factional divides which sustained years of fighting.

It could take several more days for the panel of three foreign experts to complete its review of the fraud allegations leveled by Karzai's rivals.

Baheen said that on the recommendation of the panel, the electoral commission had released for counting all but 12 of some 100 ballot boxes quarantined in the probe. The remaining 12 are still quarantined, pending further investigations.

Polling day passed without major violence, prompting American commanders and Afghan politicians to write off the Taliban as a fading force.

But the euphoria surrounding the elections received a damper on Saturday when a suicide attacker detonated grenades in a busy shopping street in Kabul, killing an American woman and an Afghan girl and injuring three Icelandic peacekeepers.

A purported spokesman for the Taliban claimed it carried out the attack, and said more suicide missions were being prepared.

Karzai condemned the attack as the work of the enemies of Afghanistan and Islam.

"The efforts of terrorists will be fruitless because the Afghan people are determined to continue on the path of reconstruction, democracy and stability," he said in a statement.