Afghan President Hamid Karzai announced today that his government will allow the parliament to seat on Wednesday without them agreeing to his previous demand to abide by the decisions of a tribunal investigating the fraud in September’s elections.
At the same time, Karzai is not accepting the demands of the parliamentarians to close the tribunal down, saying that the Supreme Court has every right to investigate the massive fraud in the vote.
NATO is angry, however, because they insist that Afghanistan “needs a parliament” for their 2011 war strategy to work. That the parliament was elected in one of the most crooked elections in history appears not to be a problem.
Karzai had initially put off the initial seating of parliament until February to give the tribunal time to finish its report first. The MPs chosen as winners by one of the previous investigators, however, insisted that he was just trying to delay the inevitable, and initially had planned to seat on Sunday. The deal to push it to Wednesday was meant to prevent an open clash between Afghan security forces and parliament.