(Abdullah to boycott Afghan runoff? Afghan presidential challenger Abdullah Abdullah may boycott next week's runoff against incumbent Hamid Karzai. NBC's Richard Engel reports.)
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Karzai rival will boycott runoff, aide says
Afghan presidential challenger Abdullah Abdullah plans to boycott next week's runoff against President Hamid Karzai and instead call for postponement of the vote until the spring, his campaign manager said Saturday.
"As of now" Abdullah plans to call for a boycott during a press conference Sunday, Satar Murad said.
Abdullah will also call for an interim government to run the country until a new, fair vote can be held, Murad said.
The runoff was called after massive fraud in the first round vote on Aug. 20.
A boycott would severely undermine a vote intended to affirm the Afghan government's credibility.
The political stalemate in Kabul comes as President Barack Obama has been meeting with his advisers to try to determine U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, including troop levels. A weakened Afghan government will make it harder for Obama to get public support for his efforts.
October has been the deadliest month for U.S. forces since the 2001 invasion to oust the Taliban. The Afghan war has intensified this year as militants have stepped up attacks and more troops have arrived trying to stabilize the country.
Abdullah, who was once Karzai's foreign minister, put forward several conditions this week to avoid a repeat of the massive fraud of the August presidential election, including the replacement of the top election official and the suspension of several ministers.
He set Saturday as the deadline for his demands to be met.
Breakdown in talks
A Westerner close to talks between the two sides said their agenda also included a power-sharing proposal by the challenger and cited both Karzai and Abdullah as saying that talks broke down Friday, prompting Abdullah to decide on a boycott of the Nov. 7 runoff.
An Afghan figure close to Abdullah said Saturday that the boycott decision came after a contentious and fruitless meeting Thursday over Abdullah's conditions for a runoff.
Both spoke on condition of anonymity, saying that the announcement must come from Abdullah himself.
The Afghan said a boycott was certain, and that Abdullah would likely tell his supporters to simply stay home during the vote.
Afghan electoral law says that any vote cast for a candidate who withdraws will not be counted. However, neither electoral nor the constitution specifically address the issue of a candidate who does not formally withdraw but urges supporters to boycott the polls.
A spokesman for the Afghan election commission said that it is too late for Abdullah to officially withdraw and that a boycott will not prevent the runoff from going forward.
"The election will be held and all procedures will go as normal," Noor Mohammad Noor said.
A Personal Choice
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said a runoff with only one candidate would not necessarily threaten the legitimacy of the process.
"We see that happen in our own country where, for whatever combination of reasons, one of the candidates decides not to go forward," Clinton told reporters in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. "I don't think it has anything to do with the legitimacy of the election. It's a personal choice which may or may not be made."
The runoff election in Afghanistan became necessary after widespread fraud in the first round of voting in August resulted in hundreds of thousands of Karzai's ballots being invalidated, pushing him below the required 50 percent margin to win. Concerns have been raised about a possible repetition of the ballot-box stuffing and distorted tallies in the second round.
Abdullah complained Monday that there were no assurances that the November vote would be fairer than the first balloting and demanded that the head of the Karzai-appointed Independent Election Commission, Azizullah Lodin, be fired.
Even if Abdullah withdraws, it's unclear whether Karzai could be proclaimed the winner or if the runoff would still have to proceed, either with Abdullah on the ballot or the third-place finisher, lawmaker Ramazan Bashardost.
A spokesman for the Afghan election commission said that it is too late for Abdullah to officially withdraw and that a boycott will not prevent the runoff from going forward.
"The election will be held and all procedures will go as normal," Noor Mohammad Noor said.
U.S. officials have been concerned that the second round would expose Afghan civilians to attack by Taliban militants opposed to the election.
Last Wednesday, Taliban attackers killed five U.N. employees — including one American — and three Afghans in a brazen assault on a residential hotel housing international staff in the heart of Kabul. The three attackers also died.
Afghan intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh said Afghan authorities had advance information that a Taliban attack in Kabul was in the works but was expected it during rush hour, and officials were unsure of the target.
Instead, the attackers struck just before dawn. Saleh said eight people had been arrested for their roles in the attack, including an Afghan imam who was apprehended when he arrived by plane in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia.
Saleh said the detainees told interrogators the attackers came from Pakistan's Swat Valley and that the al-Qaida mastermind fled across the border into Pakistan's lawless tribal area, where the al-Qaida leadership is believed hiding.
Casualties have been on the rise since President Barack Obama sent more troops to confront the Taliban.
On Saturday, the NATO-led force announced the latest coalition death in the war. The Canadian Defense Department said the casualty was a 24-year-old Canadian national killed in a bomb blast outside the southern city of Kandahar on Friday.
Pakistan says soldiers close in on Taliban bases
Pakistani soldiers closed in on two major Taliban strongholds in South Waziristan on Saturday, officials said, as government jets pounded insurgent hide-outs and the prime minister said the country had no choice but to defeat the militants.
"We are at war," Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani told a press conference in the city of Peshawar, where a militant car bombing a few days ago killed more than 115 people. "Our civil leadership, our military leadership and political leadership ... we are on the same page that we have to fight the militancy. We do not have any other option because their intentions are to take over" the country.
Pakistan, which years ago helped nurture the Taliban's rise in neighboring Afghanistan, is now involved in an escalating fight with the militants. Two weeks ago, the government launched the offensive in the South Waziristan tribal region, viewed as the main stronghold in the country of both the Taliban and al-Qaida. The offensive has drawn retaliatory militant attacks across Pakistan.
On Saturday, seven paramilitary soldiers driving through the Khyber tribal area were killed in a roadside bomb planted by suspected Taliban militants, said local official Ghulam Farooq Khan. The area is famed for the Khyber pass, the main route for ferrying supplies to U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
Mehsud targeted
That attack came as Pakistani jets bombed three hide-outs of Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud in the Orkazai tribal region, killing at least eight militants and wounding several others, intelligence officials said. Another airstrike, about 40 miles from the first and near the Afghan border, killed seven militants in the Kurram tribal region, the officials said.
The veracity of the reports could not be confirmed. Authorities have effectively sealed off the tribal areas, semiautonomous regions where the central government in Islamabad has long had only minimal authority, and it is all but impossible to independently verifying such claims.
Pakistan appears eager to prove that it is moving aggressively against the militants after a three-day visit earlier this week by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Clinton said she found it "hard to believe" that no one in Pakistan's government knew where al-Qaida's leadership was hiding and warned that once the current offensive is finished, "the Pakistanis will have to go on to try to root out other terrorist groups, or we're going to be back facing the same threats."
American officials have long said al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants accused in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks operate out of the region along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan — a region that includes South Waziristan.
Pakistan has publicly reacted to Clinton's chiding with a mixture of acceptance and resentment.
"If we are honest, we cannot deny that much of what she said was true," The News newspaper said in a Saturday editorial, but added that U.S. policies — like foreign policy anywhere — stem from self-interest.
"There is nothing noble about Washington's focus on Islamabad. But it is possible that at this particular moment in history the interests of both nations coincide," the newspaper said.
Nerve center reached
In South Waziristan, the army said it had surrounded the key Taliban stronghold of Sararogha on three sides and had reached the outskirts of Makeen, which it called "the nerve center" of the Pakistani Taliban.
Government soldiers had killed a total of 33 militants over the past 24 hours, discovered a factory for making roadside bombs and seized a handful of weapons, the army said in its Saturday statement.
Pakistani forces were facing stiff resistance in the village of Kaniguram, with soldiers fighting house to house and taking mortar and sniper fire as they searched for more militants.
Four Pakistani soldiers had been injured in fighting in South Waziristan over the past day, the report said.
In Karachi, police arrested three suspected militants Saturday and seized 65 pounds of explosives and other weaponry. The men were involved in kidnappings for ransom and bank robberies to help fund the Taliban, said senior police officer Fayyaz Khan.
In North West Frontier Province, the local government said it was reopening schools starting Monday, two weeks after schools across the country closed when the offensive set off a string of retaliatory attacks.
"There are (general) security threats, but we will fight back," Mian Iftikhar Husain, the provincial information minister, told reporters in Peshawar. Most of Pakistan's schools reopened last week.
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Sources: MSNBC, Google Maps
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