War in Afghanistan could destroy Obama. Photo / AP

War in Afghanistan could destroy Obama. Photo / AP

There must be a better way to rig an election.

First the Western powers occupying Afghanistan let President Hamid Karzai stay in the job for months after his term expired, on the grounds that an election in the late summer would be easier to arrange.

They finally held the election in August and declared it a shining success.

Karzai, Washington's man in Kabul, had been re-elected, even though turnout nationally was only 30 per cent. (In the Taleban-dominated south, it was only 5 per cent.)

President Barack Obama, who was already under great pressure to send more US troops to Afghanistan, declared that "this was an important step forward in the Afghan people's effort to take control of their future".

And then it all fell apart.

As the evidence emerged that up to a third of the votes allegedly cast for Karzai had been fraudulent, the United States backed away from celebrating his "re-election".

Indeed, the fraud was so blatant and massive that even the Afghans began to choke on it, and various American emissaries threatened and bullied Karzai into accepting a run-off vote against his closest rival in the first round of voting, Dr Abdullah Abdullah.

That vote would have been held tomorrow, but Abdullah knew that he would lose again.

He belongs to the Tajik ethnic group, and there are twice as many Pashtuns (Karzai's ethnic group) in Afghanistan as there are Tajiks.

So Abdullah complained that the election officials conducting this run-off would be exactly the same men who had rigged the first round - which was true - and demanded their resignation.

Karzai refused to remove them, Abdullah used that as an excuse to withdraw from the election, and last Sunday the run-off was cancelled.

Karzai was proclaimed President once again on the basis of the discredited first-round vote, and the whole sorry mess was abandoned.

But there is a silver lining: if Obama wants to bail out of Afghanistan, he now has an excellent excuse for doing so.

The pathetic shambles of the past few months has had relatively little impact on public opinion in Afghanistan, where Karzai's democratic "legitimacy" was never much of an issue.

His power, such as it is, has always depended on US military support and access to Western aid, not on votes.