Later yesterday, Holbrooke got in a shot at the United Nations’ former envoy to Afghanistan, Kai Eide. Eide’s old deputy, the former U.S. ambassador (and Holbrooke ally) Peter Galbraith, accused Eide of placing the U.N. mission in a quiescent position when Karzai committed widespread fraud in last year’s presidential election. After a screening of a forthcoming HBO documentary about Holbrooke’s friend Sergio Vieira de Mello, the revered U.N. diplomat killed in Iraq in 2003, Holbrooke told a panel discussion that he had recently come from a Kabul meeting that included Staffan de Mistura, Eide’s successor, whom he called “a substantial step forward” from his predecessor.

Reached for comment, Galbraith mischievously replied, “I sometimes wonder if Karzai is a little too enthusiastic about Afghanistan’s most popular export.”

More seriously, the ambassador denied the accusation flatly. “As to that comment, I don’t talk like that,” Galbraith said. “Second, when I first heard the news this morning I thought that obviously Mr. Karzai is pulling an April Fool’s joke, but then I reflected and realized we don’t have that kind of warm and fuzzy relationship. Needless to say, the U.N. fired me for wanting to do something about the [election] fraud, so it’s a big lie that I was the one who committed it.”

Karzai is trying to convince parliament to respect an edict he issued in February that reserved himself the right to appoint the members of  an independent election fraud watchdog, the Electoral Complaints Commission, that presently has the majority of its membership appointed by the United Nations. Parliament’s lower house has already rejected the move, but Karzai is trying to convince the upper house to support him. “We shouldn’t give a goddamn cent to the Afghanistan parliamentary election unless it’s run by Afghans who are nonpartisan and not one of whom is appointed by Karzai,” Galbraith said. “It is Karzai and his government that’s the fraud, not me.”

In a letter to the paper that the former U.S. ambassador to Croatia is circulating, Galbraith explains that he “never proposed to oust Karzai,” but instead tried to resolve “a looming constitutional crisis caused by Karzai’s maneuvering to stay in office a year beyond the end of his legal term — without submitting himself to the inconvenience of an election.” The Times, Galbraith writes, “deliberately excluded information that would have presented the accusations in a much different light.”

Galbraith’s full letter to the Times is after the jump.

On Thursday, The New York Times ran what it represented as a scoop: that I had plotted to oust Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai in September. In fact, U.N. officials made the same charges in a news conference in October for the same reason that they have trotted them out again: to draw attention away from the U.N.’s mishandling of fraud in the Afghanistan elections.

Readers deserve context in order to understand a complex story. In this case, the Times deliberately excluded information that would have presented the accusations in a much different light. The truth is that I never proposed to oust Karzai, but instead tried to resolve a looming constitutional crisis caused by Karzai’s maneuvering to stay in office a year beyond the end of his legal term — without submitting himself to the inconvenience of an election.

According to Afghanistan’s constitution, President Karzai’s term in office ended May 21, 2009. As presidential elections had not been held by this constitutionally mandated date, Afghanistan’s Supreme Court, in a highly controversial decision, extended Karzai’s term through the planned Aug. 20 presidential elections.

Those elections were characterized by massive fraud. Afghanistan Independent Election Commission (IEC), which was supposed to conduct the elections impartially, operated as the partisan agent of the Karzai campaign. In all instances, it was the IEC staff who perpetrated the fraud, who collaborated with those who committed the fraud, or who knew about the fraud and did nothing about it. On Sept. 7, the IEC voted to include hundreds of thousands of obviously phony votes in Mr. Karzai’s total, this putting him above the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff. Although there was a process in place for a separate body — the U.N.-appointed Election Complaints Commission (ECC) — to review the IEC’s decision, this was sure to be a lengthy process given the extent of the fraud.

On Sept. 8, the chairman of the IEC and Afghanistan’s chief electoral officer both advised me, as the acting head of the U.N. Mission in Afghanistan, that it would not be possible to hold any required runoff in 2009. They said winter weather made it impossible to have voting after Oct. 15 in large parts of the country, and that the earliest realistic date for a runoff was May 2010.

This raised the serious question of who would be president until 2010. Mr. Karzai’s term had expired. And the opposition would never accept his continuation in office for a full year after the end of his term. As the U.N. had a specific mandate to use its good offices to resolve political conflicts in Afghanistan, it clearly was appropriate for us to consider a way out of this looming political and constitutional crisis. In a private meeting Sept. 9 with Kai Eide, the head of the U.N. Mission who had returned from holiday that day, I urged consideration of having an interim government, headed by a respected neutral figure, in office until a second round could be held in 2010. There was no thought that this would be imposed on the Afghans; rather it would only go forward with the consent of both President Karzai and his main challenger, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah. I also proposed revamping the IEC so that it would be a truly independent body that would have the confidence of both Mr. Karzai and his opponents.

After initially expressing interest in the idea, Mr. Eide asked me to drop it in a meeting on Sept. 10, which I did. Two days later, Mr. Eide sent me a text message asking that I join him in briefing the U.N. Security Council at the end of the month. A few days later, several stories appeared in the British press asserting that Mr. Eide had ordered me to leave Kabul because I wanted to do something about fraud in the Afghanistan elections and he did not. (I had volunteered to leave temporarily, but otherwise the stories were correct). Both Mr. Eide and the U.N. spokesperson in New York issued strong statements expressing confidence in me. Clearly Mr. Eide would not have invited me to help him brief the Security Council and the U.N. would not have supported me if they believed that I was plotting to oust President Karzai.

At the end of the month, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon decided to dismiss me from my post in Afghanistan, apparently deciding that a policy disagreement within a mission — even if expressed privately — was intolerable. Neither he nor anyone at U.N. headquarters asked me about my concerns about fraud in the Afghanistan elections. This proved deeply embarrassing when, a few weeks later, I was proved entirely correct.

Since then, the U.N. has been scrambling to come up with an alternative explanation for my firing. At a news conference Oct. 12, Edmond Mulet, an assistant secretary general, said I was fired for proposing an unconstitutional solution to Afghanistan’ s election crisis — the very charge recycled by the Times in Thursday’s story — and darkly hinted that I had staged my firing so that I could run for political office in my home state of Vermont. When this didn’t get traction, Ban Ki-moon told the British daily Independent on Nov. 4 that I was fired for wanting to disenfranchise Afghans by closing polling centers. Actually, I wanted to close the fake polling centers that produced the hundreds of thousands of phony votes that effectively disenfranchised all Afghans.

The Times story quotes Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, as saying he had no knowledge of my supposed plot. The U.S. ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, told the Times the same thing, although he is not cited by the paper. It strains credulity to believe that I proposed a plot to oust Karzai to a lesser embassy official (as the Times reports) and he never informed his ambassador or Holbrooke. To be clear, I never proposed to oust Karzai to anyone in the U.S. government, and any discussion would have been about the constitutional issues involved in holding a runoff in May 2010.

Mr. Eide is quoted in the Times as saying President Karzai was “deeply upset” about my supposed plan but fails to disclose how Mr. Karzai would have learned of this very private conversation between Mr. Eide and myself. I can only presume that Eide told him. Oddly, Kai Eide himself proposed that Karzai be replaced with an interim government in a meeting with Kabul-based diplomats in Kabul in October. The Times reporters knew this but also chose not to include it in the story.

The Times excluded one other detail that may explain why this story, which was about conversations that took place in September, didn’t surface until Dec. 17. On Dec. 10, I initiated a wrongful dismissal action against the United Nations. I told the reporter this, but he preferred to wait to run this news in a separate story Dec. 18. Times readers are sophisticated enough to smell a rat when the defendant in a legal action puts out a story intended to smear the plaintiff, but no one reading the Dec. 16 story had the context to see it in that light.

The massive fraud in Afghanistan’s presidential elections has set back the prospects for success in a military mission that soon will involve 100,000 U.S. and allied troops. The U.N., which raised $264 million from U.S. taxpayers to pay for elections that were supposed to be honest, refused to take actions that might have prevented the fraud and after the voting tried to cover it up. This is the real scandal of Afghanistan’s presidential elections. Let’s not change the subject.

Word on the Hill and at European embassies today is that the top contender for the job and Washington’s first choice is veteran Swedish diplomat Staffan di Mistura, who has served as UN Special Representative of the Secretary General to Iraq since 2007, and previously as UN SRSG to Southern Lebanon, and head of the World Food Program in Italy, among other jobs. Among his other experience leading UN missions in post-conflict  zones where the US has tens of thousands of boots on the ground, di Mistura also speaks half the languages of the NATO alliance, as well as Arabic.

“Di Mistura is the U.S. preference,” one Hill source says. “He was the SRSG in Iraq, he’s Swedish, before Iraq he was in [the World Food Program. Well known official."

It'll be interesting to see what di Mistura -- or whoever the next UN Afghanistan chief turns out to be -- thinks of a current NATO proposal to create a sort of chief civilian to coordinate the non-military end of NATO's mission. For instance:

[A]dministration officials and NATO allies are in discussion to determine if a mechanism can be created to bring greater coherence to the efforts of Afghan, U.S., allied and other civilian assistance to the Afghan people for development and governance — a sort of civilian counterpart to McChrystal’s command of all U.S. and NATO forces. The idea is not new, but the Obama administration has given it renewed emphasis, said a senior European diplomat, although the precise structure of that mechanism has yet to be determined. “This has been discussed entirely within the context of the strategic theme of turning responsibility over to the Afghans,” the diplomat said.

That person would necessarily work closely with the UN mission.

The run off was certain to be more fraudulent than the Aug 20 vote with more ghost poling centers and the same corrupt officials in charge. We are now stuck with the same corrupt and inefficient [incumbent President Hamid] Karzai that we had for the last seven years but now he is also rightly seen as illegitimate by a large segment of the Afghan population and by public opinion in the troop contributing countries. No amount of spin can obscure the fact that we spent upwards of $200 miilion on an election that has been a total fiasco.

The Afghan elections commission, which both Abdullah and Galbraith identified as a body filled with Karzai loyalists, has announced there will be no runoff election on Nov. 7 now that the challenger has pulled out. Galbraith wrote in an op-ed published yesterday that the runoff is was sure to be as disastrous as the first round of voting anyway.

But OK, so that’s all over with, and a runoff vote is scheduled for next week. So how does the Afghanistan election commission plan to ensure the runoff between Karzai and rival Abdullah Abdullah is fraud-free?

Despite having fewer poll workers and a declining security situation, Afghanistan’s election commission announced Thursday it would increase the number of polling centers for the presidential runoff.

No wonder Abdullah views the commission as being a fixing agent for Karzai. In its defense, a commission spokesman tells the Christian Science Monitor:

[T]he number of districts without any polling centers will rise from eight to 11, out of a total 380. And the number of poll workers at each station will drop from five to two. Workers will have much less work to do, says Noor, since there will be no provincial council elections to also administer and the number of candidates on the presidential ballot has shrunk from dozens to two.

Reassured?

Let’s not pull a DeSean Jackson here. It’s not like a runoff is guaranteed to be fraud-free either. Massive fraud was committed — under the watchful eye of the international community — in the Aug. 20 election. What’s the plan for preventing it this time around?

In the absence of having a credible Afghan partner … it makes no sense to ramp up. On the other hand we cannot afford to pull out. … At this point, no surge. … [W]e also don’t have unlimited resources and unless those troops can secure an area in a way that then Afghan partners, the government, the Afghan army, the Afghan police can come in and fill in after them, we’re going to be there as an occupying force for a very long time and that to me doesn’t make sense.

That’s been a critique — if not necessarily a prescription — endorsed by, among other people, Andrew Exum of the Center for a New American Security, one of the advisers to Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s strategy review. And it’s at the heart of the current White House debate over changing strategy. Cue the speculation about whether Galbraith was trying to influence the administration’s decision making on behalf of someone in the White House meetings.

I also notice that the chyron used by Diane Sawyer in this clip is “Surge Or Leave?” Absolutely no one within the Obama administration is arguing that the U.S. needs to leave Afghanistan. Galbraith’s substantive recommendations are closest to those of Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who has not ruled out a counterinsurgency strategy and leans most heavily on more Afghan troops to prosecute it.

The U.N. has no choice but to address this, which is surely Galbraith’s intent. It’s not just the credibility of Hamid Karzai that’s on the line anymore.

Notice, as well, this reference to where the Obama administration stands on the question. This is from a description of how Galbraith attempted to stop Afghan election officials from counting so-called ghost polling centers in the balloting:

Along with ambassadors from the United States and key allies, I met with the Afghan ministers of defense and the interior as well as the commission’s chief election officer…

And such is the way that Galbraith enlists Amb. Karl Eikenberry as an ally.

“The UN created the ‘Galbraith fiasco’ by firing me at this time,” Galbraith said. “Inevitably people were going to ask why. And Abdullah’s strong comments came before my letter leaked and before I spoke to the media.”

Galbraith is referring to the letter he wrote to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, published by The New York Times today, saying UNAMA can’t “overlook the fraud without compromising our neutrality and becoming complicit in a cover-up.” Abdullah Abdullah, the Afghan presidential candidate whom Hamid Karzai has (probably) defeated, said through an aide, that “By firing someone like Peter Galbraith from his post, it is the first sign that fraud is victorious over the law.”