Karzai's Lead Insurmountable

Hamid Karzai was assured Monday of a majority in Afghanistan's election to become its first democratically chosen president, and a top foreign envoy said the poll reflected the will of the people.

With nearly 95 percent of ballots counted, Karzai already has more than half the total estimated 8.1 million votes cast — enough to avoid a runoff, even if all the remaining votes go to his 17 opponents.

But he has yet to be declared the winner as a panel of foreign experts was still reviewing allegations of electoral fraud leveled by other candidates. The panel does not expect to finalize its report until the end of the week, said Craig Jenness, a Canadian lawyer on the panel.

The joint U.N.-Afghan electoral commission has said it will not announce the official results of the Oct. 9 ballot until the fraud investigations are complete.

The top European envoy to Afghanistan said Monday that although there were irregularities — including problems with ink used to prevent multiple voting — it was not serious enough to change the outcome.

"There were some flaws, the ink most obviously," Francesc Vendrell, the European Union's special representative, told British Broadcasting Corp. radio. "But I very much doubt they would affect the actual outcome of the vote.

"The vote pretty accurately reflects what the people feel," he said.

Karzai's campaign team has said he is certain of victory in the first round of voting. He currently has 4,240,041 votes, or 55.3 percent, 39 percentage points ahead of his chief rival, former Education Minister Yunus Qanooni.

Qanooni is willing to accept the outcome, provided the panel acknowledges there were irregularities.

"For the national interest and so the country does not go into crisis, we will respect the result of the election," his spokesman Syed Hamid Noori said late Sunday. "But we also want the fraud to be made clear."

Ethnic Hazara chieftain Mohammed Mohaqeq, running third at 11.8 percent, 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 it too was waiting for the result of the investigation.

Victory would make Karzai Afghanistan's first popularly chosen leader after a quarter century of war and give him a five-year term in which he has pledged to raise the pitiful living standards.

It could also provide a foreign policy boost to Afghanistan's main sponsor, President Bush, in his own bid for re-election on Nov. 2.

Karzai has become a familiar figure on the world stage since becoming the country's interim leader after U.S. forces drove out the former ruling Taliban regime in late 2001 for harboring Osama bin Laden.

At home, he has rounded up strong support in the cities and among fellow Pashtuns, the largest ethnic group. But Afghans are also frustrated at the slow pace of reconstruction.

His rivals have scored big among ethnic minorities in the north and center of the country, a legacy of the ethnic and factional divides produced by years of infighting.

"I don't think it's good to criticize the election further, as it could bring the country to crisis. We respect the will of the people," said outsider candidate Homayoon Shah Asifi.

"If Karzai wins, I will congratulate him. But if Karzai fails, the country will be in trouble."

Polling day passed without major violence, prompting American commanders and Afghan politicians to write off the Taliban — which had threatened to sabotage the vote — as a fading force.

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

The blast happened on Kabul's Chicken Street, a bustling shopping street popular with foreigners. Officials said the suicide attacker set off grenades, killing himself and wounding several others, including three NATO soldiers.

The slain American was Jamie Michalsky, 23, from Cokato, Minn.

She worked for Worldwide Language Resources, a Maine-based company that provides translators. She was working in Uzbekistan, but was in Afghanistan to see a doctor about a hand injury, according to her stepfather, Dan Everson.

Michalsky, who was raised by her grandmother, attended college, then joined the Army Reserves. She was working as a police officer in Texas before being called up for active duty, and served for about a year in Afghanistan, until late last year, Everson said.

Michalsky, who learned Russian in the Army, got the translating job after leaving active duty, Everson said.

"She would jump out of airplanes. She lived every minute of her life," said her mother, Lissa Michalsky.

Meanwhile, foreign-trained counter-narcotics paramilitaries raided an opium market in the heartland of Afghanistan's booming drug industry, burning six shops and arresting dozens of people, an official said Monday.

Afghan troops and "foreigners" took part in the raid late Sunday on the Shadal market in eastern Nangarhar province's Achin district, said local government spokesman Faizan ul-Haq. He did not know the foreigners' nationalities.

"Six shops and five sacks of opium were burned, and about 75 people were arrested," ul-Haq said. "The troops seemed very angry and deliberately burned the shops."

He said thirteen of those detained were still in custody on Monday, but he had no further details.

Britain and the United States are spending millions on training special Afghan forces to stem the expansion of the country's opium industry, which supplies most of the world's heroin. British customs agents and American security contractors are doing some of the training.

Opium is often traded openly in markets in Afghanistan. The government has promised a fresh drive to arrest traffickers, destroy laboratories and eradicate opium poppy crops amid fears the impoverished country is becoming a "narco-state."