Rice 'Certain' Afghan Election OK

The Bush administration is confident that Afghanistan's first direct presidential election will be deemed fair and valid despite protests from candidates that the balloting was marred by fraud, a top presidential aide said Sunday.

"This was an extraordinary day for the Afghan people, and this election is going to be judged legitimate," said President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. "I'm just certain of it."

All 15 challengers to U.S.-backed interim President Hamid Karzai, strongly favored to win, announced Saturday they would boycott the election's outcome because the ink used to mark some voters' thumbs could be rubbed off too easily. They contended this allowed people to vote multiple times.

"Clearly, there were some technical difficulties with the ink system," Rice said in a broadcast interview. "Obviously, there are technical difficulties sometimes even in the mature democracies when it comes to elections. And people have the right to challenge."

In the end, Rice said, "there will be a mechanism to resolve these concerns within the context of the Afghan election law." She added: "the United Nations and the Afghan Electoral Commission have said that they do not believe that these technical difficulties fundamentally would have changed the nature of the election."

Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards did not question the legitimacy of Saturday's historic election. He did, however, say in a broadcast interview that war-ravaged Afghanistan is far from the flourishing democracy that President Bush has portrayed time and time again on the campaign trail.

"If you look at what's actually happened in Afghanistan since the Taliban was toppled, their opium production is back up. They're producing 75 percent of the world's opium," Edwards said.

"On top of that, there are big chunks of the country still in the control of warlords and drug lords, and there are still some serious security issues in the country."

World leaders greeted the vote as a great step for democracy, but some voiced caution Sunday over the boycott of the result by opponents of Karzai, the heavy favorite.

"I think the elections will augur well for Afghanistan," Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz of neighboring Pakistan told a news conference in Islamabad. "We think President Karzai will be an element of stability for the country."

Aziz appeared with visiting German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, whose country has been a major contributor to NATO peacekeeping operations in Afghanistan.

Schroeder also praised the election.

"The peaceful completion and high voter turnout in the presidential election are grounds for optimism, despite the known problems," he said, adding that Afghanistan is only beginning "a surely long path into democracy."

Taliban rebels had vowed to turn Afghanistan's historic presidential vote into a day of bloodshed. But other than a clash that left many of their own men dead and a smattering of small-scale attacks, the threat never materialized - fueling speculation that the insurgents might be a spent force.

The boycott was an embarrassment and threatened to undercut the legitimacy of the vote, though an official count is weeks away. Karzai's opponents claimed that a foul-up in inking voters' thumbs to ensure they cast only one ballot had opened the way to fraud.

"It's unfortunate for the Afghans that the elections have been marred because of all sorts of problems," said Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi of Malaysia, chairman of the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference. "I'm sorry for them for what has happened.

Electoral officials said turnout Saturday looked extremely high - a victory in itself in a nation with no experience at direct elections. International observers called opposition demands to nullify the polls unjustified and said the boycotters had been likely to lose anyway.

"We can say that the first-ever presidential election in Afghanistan was carried out successfully in the unstable situation there," said Riza Syichbudi, a political analyst in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country which held its own first direct presidential vote last month.

"The problem is whether Hamid Karzai can use the legitimacy he's gotten from voters to break the assumption that he is only the Americans' puppet," he said.

President Bush took partial credit for the election, part of the political transformation he pledged after U.S.-led forces toppled the extremist Taliban three years ago in response to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Bush has been under attack by his Democratic rival, Sen. John Kerry, for allowing the Iraq war to distract the United States from rebuilding Afghanistan and rooting out terrorists and the remnants of the Taliban.

"A marvelous thing is happening in Afghanistan," Bush told a Saturday fund-raiser for Republican candidates in St. Louis, Missouri. "Freedom is powerful. Think about a society in which young girls couldn't go to school, and their mothers were whipped in the public square, and today they're holding a presidential election."

Bush mentioned nothing of the electoral turmoil. Later, White House press secretary Scott McClellan played down the difficulties, proclaiming "a great day for the people of Afghanistan."

In London, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw promised Saturday that Britain would continue to support the rehabilitation of Afghanistan.

"We must of course wait for the electoral process to run its full course before the authorities can confirm the legitimacy of the contest and announce a winner," Straw said in a statement.