Monitors of Afghan Vote Are Said to Back Secrecy --- KABUL, Afghanistan — The decision by Afghan election officials to announce a new president on Sunday without releasing the final vote count came as a result of pressure from senior Western officials, including the head of the United Nations mission that sponsored a total audit of the vote, according to three Western diplomats and three senior election officials. -- The omission of the results was a requirement by the losing candidate, Abdullah Abdullah, before he joined a national unity government with the declared winner, Ashraf Ghani, officials said. Mr. Abdullah had argued that releasing the numbers would legitimize an election result that was inherently invalid because of rampant ballot-box stuffing. -- Despite widespread relief on Sunday that five months of political crisis had been settled without violence, which seemed imminent at several points, many Afghans were angry that the final tally remained secret. Despite the threat of Taliban violence, millions of voters had turned out for an election runoff that ended up looking more like a deal among elites than a democratic exercise. --- During weeks of contentious negotiations between the presidential campaigns, American, European and United Nations officials were at various points on both sides of the debate over whether to release the results, according to interviews. -- However, intense concern over the potential for violence and a long delay of important political decisions, including an agreement to allow Western troops to stay in Afghanistan past 2014, moved most American and United Nations officials toward a consensus on withholding or delaying the final results. -- Jan Kubis, the head of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, known as Unama, became the face of that consensus in talks with the Independent Election Commission, according to interviews with senior Afghan and Western officials, some of whom would speak only on condition of anonymity because of political tensions. -- The Afghan election commission was initially opposed to withholding the vote totals, insisting that the law required the release of a final vote count and details like the number of fraudulent ballots. -- Mr. Kubis visited the election commission twice to persuade members to change their stance, according to Sharifa Zurmati, one of the election commissioners. -- “Jan Kubis brought this message to the I.E.C. and requested that the I.E.C. should announce the winner and not the vote percentage or figures,” Ms. Zurmati said. “We as commissioners met and agreed to do that for the sake of the national interest of the country, to avoid the country from moving toward chaos.” -- She added that Mr. Kubis had said he was asking for a delay in announcing the results at the request of both candidates. --- An official in charge of election monitoring for Mr. Ghani’s campaign, Halim Fadai, confirmed that Mr. Kubis had pushed the decision, though he was more critical. -- “He argued that the opposing team are armed and they will create a crisis,” Mr. Fadai said. “This is very unfortunate. I think the United Nations instead of supporting democracy has bowed down to the pressure of the warlords.” --- Officials at the election commission said they would release the results later, but did not specify whether that would happen before or after the inauguration for Mr. Ghani, which has been scheduled for next Monday. -- In a statement, the United Nations mission stood by the integrity of the audit, an examination of every ballot box that involved hundreds of professional election observers and experts with the United Nations Development Program, Western embassies and the European Union. -- “The I.E.C. provided a full breakdown of the results to both candidates from the presidential runoff and is committed to publishing the full results in due course,” said a Unama statement issued on Monday. -- But internal election commission documents portraying the final audit results had already begun circulating. --- Commission documents obtained from separate sources by The New York Times matched and were described as authentic by several officials with knowledge of the audit. According to the documents, Mr. Ghani was determined to have won with 3.94 million validated votes, or 55 percent, and Mr. Abdullah was determined to have received 3.19 million valid votes, 45 percent. --- Regardless of their problems with the audit, some of the European observers were distressed with the decision not to release the audit results. “I don’t see, by which almost neocolonial attitude, transparency should be denied to Afghan citizens, whereas our citizens from California to Sweden demand to know the details of political decision-making,” said Thijs Berman, the chief of the European Union observer mission to Afghanistan. -- “If the results are too uncertain, one can defend that, but that should be said to Afghan citizens,” Mr. Berman added. “I agree that there’s no other way out than this political agreement, but I do think the public is entitled to know the results.” --- A former senior Afghan official close to the process said that American diplomats had initially balked at Mr. Abdullah’s suggestion that the vote total be kept secret. -- Regardless of the reasoning, though, some Afghan officials said the Western-brokered deal was clearly a hypocritical exercise. -- “This tells the Afghan people that the international community, with their slogans of democracy, have just put another nail in the coffin of democracy in Afghanistan,” said Mr. Fadai, the election monitoring official for Mr. Ghani’s campaign. - Read More, ROD NORDLAND, NYTimes, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/23/world/asia/23afghanistan.html?ref=world