One Word: Quagmire

Karzai has been declared the winner of the Presidential elections in Afghanistan!

A truly crazy state of affairs: Afterall, one million of the ballots cast in Karzai's favour were thrown out in the first round of elections. Karzai is said to be associated with drug lords and known for governmental ineptness and forwarding the personal interests of his friends and family over Afghanistan's national interests.

Says who?: Well, Ahmed Rashid for one in this article published on October 21, 2009.

And...Peter Galbraith of The Guardian writes, "Afghanistan's presidential election is over, and it was a fiasco."

Reuters has an article on the question, "what next?" with too much of a focus on how this effects the U.S.

And the Atlantic has a round up from their archive of past articles on Afghanistan.