By Frank James
We earlier reported that Peter Galbraith was fired as the United Nations' special envoy to Afghanistan because of disagreements with the UN's top envoy there and the organization's secretary general over how to handle Afghanistan's fraudulent presidential election.
Galbraith spoke with All Things Considered host Robert Siegel about the differences of opinion that wound up costing him his job.
Asked by Robert if there was any truth to what some have said, that the firing was actually die to a personality clash, Galbraith rejected that notion.
No, that's totally inaccurate and it's an effort to obscure the issues that were at stake. This was a serious, long-running disagreement about how to handle fraud in the Afghan elections. It dates back to July when I recognized that the risk to this election was going to come from ghost polling centers, that is to say, polling centers in areas that were so insecure that they would never actually open. But they could be used to produce a lot of votes that were never cast by voters.
I tried to get the Afghan government to reduce the number of polling centers and to remove from the list those in these insecure areas. An effort, incidentally supported by the U.S., the UK and NATO.
But the Afghan government naturally complained. They were the beneficiaries of the fraud and Kai Eide, the head of the mission, decided we would say nothing more about polling centers.
Galbraith, now back home in Vermont, sounded every bit the righteous crusader in his conversation with Robert. He said:
When the question of fraud came up, I simply could not ignore it, I could not be complicit in the coverup, I could not downplay it.
He also said this:
I think it was my view and the view of other professionals who had been involved in elections that they had never seen a UN-supported election like this one, that is, with the level of fraud and the blatantly partisan behavior by the independent election commission.
categories: Afghanistan
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