Word: supporting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...again. In the next week or so, Kenneth Feinberg, the U.S. Treasury Department's special master of compensation who is scrutinizing pay packages at bailed-out banks, is expected to release a report on the 75 top pay packages at the seven firms that have received the most government support. Feinberg may say some of the salary deals are too rich and need to be reduced...
Afghanistan's fraudulent elections complicate President Obama's job as he weighs a recommendation from General Stanley McChrystal, his top commander there, to send as many as 40,000 additional troops to support a beefed-up counterinsurgency strategy. But for that strategy to work, the U.S. needs a credible Afghan partner, which Afghanistan's elections now seem unlikely to produce. (See pictures from election day in Afghanistan...
Because the elections were so critical to political stability in Afghanistan - and, therefore, prospects for the U.S.-led military mission - the U.S. and its allies needed them to go smoothly. The U.N. Security Council tasked the U.N. mission in Afghanistan to support the IEC and other Afghan institutions in the conduct of "free, fair and transparent" elections. On two occasions, I started to take action that could have reduced the risk of fraud. In July, I learned that there were 1,500 polling centers (out of a total of 7,000) sited in places either controlled by the Taliban...
...With support from U.N. election experts working within the commission, the IEC published safeguards to exclude obviously fraudulent ballots from the preliminary tally of election results. These guidelines were a matter of common sense. For example, they excluded results from polling centers that had never opened or that reported more votes than they had ballot papers. A week before the IEC was to announce the results, I learned that it was considering abandoning these safeguards. I called the chief electoral officer to express my concern. Within two hours, I found myself summoned to meet the Foreign Minister, who, on direct...
...raised $300 million from the U.S. and other Western countries to pay for the Afghan elections. The taxpayers from these countries surely expected the U.N. to spend their money on honest elections, not fraudulent ones. And countries sending troops to Afghanistan surely expected the U.N. to support elections that would put Afghanistan on a path to democracy and stability, not ones making the military mission incomparably more difficult. It is ridiculous to argue, as senior U.N. officials do now, that the U.N. had no authority to insist that the Afghan authorities conduct honest elections...