Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Tuesday made life somewhat easier for President Barack Obama by accepting the results an international review that he received less than 50 percent of the votes in Afghanistan's presidential election, requiring a runoff.

So Obama had only positive things to say about Karzai, the leader of a government widely viewed as corrupt who also benefited from widespread vote fraud in the August election.

Karzai's decision to submit to a runoff at least makes a potential decision to send significantly more U.S. troops to Afghanistan less unpalatable than it would have been otherwise.

Obama spoke briefly about Karzai and Afghanistan during a meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki:

I had the opportunity to speak with President Karzai this morning and I wanted to congratulate him on accepting the certification of the recent election. As we all know, this has been a very difficult time in Afghanistan to not only carry out a election under difficult circumstances, where there were a whole host of security issues that had to be resolved, but also post-election a lot of uncertainty.

 

President Karzai, as well as the other candidates, I think have shown that they have the interest of the Afghan people at heart, that this is a reflection of a commitment to rule of law, and an insistence that the Afghan people's will should be done. And so I expressed the American people's appreciation for this step.

As I mentioned before, this has been a difficult election. You have violent forces opposed to democracy in Afghanistan. And yet despite these very difficult conditions what we've seen is elections take place; we have now seen the IEC and the ECC in Afghanistan complete their work; we have seen the candidates expressing a willingness to abide by constitutional law, and there is a path forward in order to complete this election process.

I want to give particular thanks to Ambassador Karl Eikenberry and his team, who have been working tirelessly throughout this process. I also want to commend Senator John Kerry, who was in the region traveling and ended up working extensively with Ambassador Eikenberry and was extraordinarily constructive and very helpful. So I think he deserves great congratulations.

Moving forward, we will continue to work with our ISAF partners as well as the Afghan government, however this election turns out, to ensure that we can move the Afghan — that we can move Afghanistan towards peace and security and prosperity and that the will of the Afghan people is ultimately done. So we are pleased with the steps that have been taken today and we hope that we can build on this progress.

I finally want to thank the incredible work of our U.S. military and the young men and women who are stationed in Afghanistan who are doing so much to help bring about a more secure and prosperous and democratic Afghanistan.