‘U.S. Taxpayers Spent Hundreds of Millions of Dollars on a Fraudulent Election’

UN Documents Show Large Sums of Money Missing

Speaking again on the subject of the August election in Afghanistan, former UN Deputy Mission Chief Peter Galbraith declared today that “U.S. taxpayers spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a fraudulent election,” insisting that “everybody kept sending money” but little effort was made to ensure accountability.

Peter GalbraithIndeed, a pair of confidential UN audits on the more than $300 million dollars spent on the August vote shows that a considerable portion of the expenses were unaccounted for and to this day tens of millions of dollars are effectively “missing.”

Another UN official agreed, “the commission had no control over their financial management,” and Galbraith conceded that he was probably at fault for not doing a better job bringing attention to the problem before the vote. Galbraith was fired late last month after repeatedly complaining about fraud in the August vote.

In the end, roughly a third of President Karzai’s votes in the election, more than a million votes, were deemed to have been fraudulent, and Afghanistan will be holding a second round of voting next week.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.