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"The election cost $300m, took tens of thousands of troops to secure and left dozens dead but today it ended without a final vote." Thus ABC's Jim Sciutto picked up on a mood of relief in Kabul as Hamid Karzai was declared re-elected as President of Afghanistan after his opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, decided not to contest a runoff. "Many Afghan and western officials had already grown uneasy with Saturday's runoff vote, wondering why risk Taliban attacks against an election with only one candidate." Sciutto quoted Peter Galbraith, the onetime United Nations diplomat who blew the whistle on Karzai's systematic fraud during the first round of voting: "The real winner of this election is the Taliban, because this election has undermined Afghan confidence in democracy."
Only ABC had a correspondent file from Afghanistan. All three newscasts covered the response to Karzai's victory-by-default from the Obama Administration. NBC's Chuck Todd saw Barack Obama "reluctantly trying to talk cautious optimism about a new relationship" after months of trying to distance himself from Karzai. ABC's sardonic Jake Tapper found the White House "pleased that it did not devolve into a constitutional crisis." From the Pentagon, CBS' David Martin observed that US soldiers "are fighting and dying to support a government that has yet to prove worthy of the name." Unidentified "officials" predicted that unless Karzai disavows his corruption and incompetence "the Afghan people will cast the vote that really counts--and side with the Taliban."
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