In Afghanistan, Kerry seeks path in voting crisis

Kerry is meeting with former Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai and former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah

Secretary of State John Kerry sought today to broker a deal between Afghanistan's rival presidential candidates as a bitter dispute over last month's runoff election risked spiralling out of control.

Kerry, who arrived predawn in Kabul on a hastily arranged visit, is meeting with former Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai and former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah as well as the current leader, President Hamid Karzai.

The objective is to convince both candidates to hold off on declaring victory or trying to set up a government until the United Nations can conduct an audit of extensive fraud allegations in the voting.

For the United States, the political crisis is threatening to undermine more than a decade of efforts to leave behind a strong Afghanistan capable of containing the Taliban insurgency and preventing extremist groups like al-Qaida from using the territory to endanger the American homeland.

"We are in a very, very critical moment for Afghanistan," Kerry told reporters after meeting the UN chief in Afghanistan, Jan Kubis. "Legitimacy hangs in the balance. The future potential of the transition hangs in the balance. So we've a lot of work to do."

The hope, Kerry said, was to create a process that confers legitimacy on whoever emerges as the rightful leader of Afghanistan. "But I can't tell you that's an automatic at this point."

For his part, Kubis said the UN was searching for an election result "that strengthens stability and unity in the country, and not the other way around."

With Iraq wracked by insurgency, Afghanistan's election is posing a new challenge to President Barack Obama's effort to leave behind two secure states while ending America's long wars.

Both Ghani and Abdullah have vowed to sign a bilateral security pact with Washington, which says it needs the legal guarantees in order to leave behind some 10,000 boots on the ground in Afghanistan after most American troops are withdrawn at the end of the year.

If no clear leader emerges, the US may have to pull out all its forces, an unwanted scenario that played out in Iraq just three years ago. Karzai has refused to sign the agreement, leaving it in the hands of his successor.

The preliminary runoff results suggested a massive turnaround in favour of the onetime World Bank economist Ghani, who lagged significantly behind Abdullah in first-round voting.

Abdullah, a top leader of the Northern Alliance that battled the Taliban before the US-led invasion in 2001, claims massive ballot-stuffing and his supporters have spoken of establishing a "parallel government," raising the spectre of the Afghan state collapsing. Abdullah was runner-up to Karzai in a fraud-riddled 2009 presidential vote before he pulled out of that runoff.

The winner amid all the chaos could be the Taliban, whose fight against the government persists despite the United States spending hundreds of billions of dollars and losing more than 2,000 lives since invading the country after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.