Afghanistan: U.S. Eyes Afghan Vote, Seeking Amenable Ally --- WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has watched cautiously from the sidelines in the months leading up to Saturday’s elections in Afghanistan, focusing instead on new crises in the Middle East and Ukraine, and no longer on the country that was a foreign policy priority when President Obama first entered office. -- Current and former administration officials, however, say that ensuring a stable Afghanistan remains important, not just to validate the 1,800 American lives lost and billions of dollars spent over the past 13 years, but to avoid complicating the United States’ larger strategic interests in the region: a stable nuclear-armed Pakistan, improved relations between Pakistan and India, and responding to the growing fear among Central Asian nations about an emboldened Russia. -- Though the White House has been exhausted by its acrimonious jousting with President Hamid Karzai, it remains open to rekindling a relationship with the government of his successor. -- “Our engagement with the Afghan government has turned out very badly, and our assumptions about Karzai, going back to the Bush administration, have turned out to be wrong,” said Vali Nasr, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a former Obama administration official. “The challenge now is how to manage Afghanistan in a way that it does not become an immediate security problem at a time when the administration has a lot of other things on its plate.” -- The Pentagon said this week that there were no deaths in March among the 33,500 American troops still in Afghanistan, the first month without an American fatality there since January 2007. The continuing violence in the country, however, was underscored Friday when an Associated Press photographer was killed and a reporter for the wire service was seriously wounded by a police officer. Election days, an American official said, tend to be among the most violent days in Afghanistan. -- For months, American officials have steered clear of displays of support for any candidate or any other involvement in the vote. When reports in December about a United States-financed poll raised questions about meddling, the administration cut off funding for all polls, a senior administration official said. The official noted that pro-democracy groups continued to finance polling, so Afghan voters were still getting a sense of the direction of the campaign. -- “We’re taking the back seat,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “We’re trying to give the space for the Afghans to hold these elections with no interference from Washington.” -- Nevertheless, the administration still has a deep interest in an election that is fair and peaceful, in contrast to the vote in 2009, which was marred by widespread fraud. “It could mark Afghanistan’s first democratic transition of power, and we all have a stake in seeing that milestone achieved,” Secretary of State John Kerry said this week. -- A bigger challenge could come if, as expected, no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote, forcing a runoff that could delay the installation of a new president for several months. It further remains to be seen how much influence Mr. Karzai will wield on the political landscape after he leaves the presidency. -- “There’s an opportunity now with the changing of presidents to re-establish more productive relations on both parts,” said Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, who has visited Afghanistan 14 times.