Karzai Confident Of Afghan Win

Interim leader Hamid Karzai is certain to win the country's landmark presidential election, his campaign spokesman said Tuesday, after early returns gave him a commanding lead over his rivals.

With one-quarter of the votes from the Oct. 9 ballot counted, Karzai has captured 61.6 percent. His closest challenger, former Education Minister Yunus Qanooni, trails with 18.2 percent.

"We think we are secure now," the spokesman, Hamed Elmi, told The Associated Press. "When they announce it formally, then we will celebrate."

Elmi said that while Karzai was "quite pleased" with the results so far, his campaign staff was "100 percent" sure that the U.S.-backed incumbent would win a simple majority of the 8 million votes cast to avoid a run-off.

Qanooni has so far refused to concede defeat and claimed on Monday that only fraud has given Karzai the lead in the race to become the country's first-ever popularly elected leader.

But the running-mate of ethnic Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum — third with 8.7 percent — conceded on Tuesday that the race was over.

Chafiga Habibi, vice presidential candidate on Dostum's ticket, told AP, "I think Karzai is going to win because he's a long way ahead in the results, and we can't ignore this reality."

Election officials say they will not call the result until the winner is certain, but have also said that the tallies are unlikely to change much once 20 percent of the votes have been counted — a point reached on Monday.

Despite poor weather and Taliban threats of attacks to sabotage the election, about three-quarters of registered voters cast their ballots in a democratic experiment supposed to cement the country's re-emergence since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.

The polling on Oct. 9 was largely peaceful, but in a reminder of the country's continuing insecurity, an explosion hit a vehicle of the electoral commission on Monday, killing five people in southeastern Paktika province, including one election organizer. The government strongly condemned the blast as "the negative action of terrorists."

"We know they are the enemy of our country and they were not able to do anything on polling day, but still they are trying to disrupt the process," presidential spokesman Jawed Ludin told a news conference Tuesday.

Meanwhile, six rockets were fired at U.S. military camps in eastern Kunar and Nangahar provinces late Monday and early Tuesday, but caused no injuries or damage, spokesman Maj. Mark McCann said.

Karzai, Afghanistan's interim leader since the Taliban's ouster in 2001, is seen by many Afghans as a bridge to its international backers and a leader untainted by its bloody past.

Still, many Afghans are impatient at the slow pace of reconstruction, and minorities are wary of his strong support in the Pashtun-dominated south — from where the Taliban also drew their main strength.

Qanooni, an ethnic Tajik, said on Monday that he believed he would be leading in the vote-count if the ballot had been fair.

He alleged that ballot boxes had been stuffed with votes in favor of Karzai in at least four provinces — but election officials say there is no evidence of this.

Ethnic Hazara candidate Mohammed Mohaqeq, who is leading the count in two central provinces and currently lies fourth overall with 4.6 percent of the votes, said that Afghans had voted along tribal lines for the leading four candidates.

But he accused Karzai of cheating to garner the Pashtun vote, and refused to concede defeat.

"In some places he's much lower and I am coming up. Maybe if he cheats more he will win," Mohaqeq said.

Karzai's rivals have lodged dozens of complaints with a panel of foreign experts set up to head off their threat to boycott the results, though it is unclear if it will report before the release of the official election result at the end of October.

By Stephen Graham