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Afghanistan may not meet election date: Karzai

* One US soldier killed, two injured
* French soldiers take over from US troops in southern Afghan town

MONTREAL: Visiting Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Tuesday said he would not rule out postponing his country’s presidential election, currently scheduled for June 2004.

The goal is to meet the June 2004 deadline, Karzai said in a television interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. But “if we fail for whatever reason, technical or otherwise,” then “we should go to the Afghan people and say, ‘here we have not been able to do it. Now will you give us another month or two’.”

“But we must try to reach that point in having the elections done on time. That’s when our legitimacy runs out,” he said.

Until now Karzai said that all of the deadlines for restoring the country to democracy have been met. He also said his government was “very confident that we will have the Grand Council again in December to ratify the constitution.” However “what begins from there once we have the new constitution is the difficult part,” he said. “We don’t have a voters list,” he said. “We don’t have the mechanisms in place. We don’t have lots of other things.”

Karzai wished he had more time to fix the shortcomings. “But we don’t have it,” he said. “We have promised the Afghan people we’ll go to them in June and ask them for a direct vote to elect another government, another head of state.” Karzai met with Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien over the weekend in Ottawa.

Meanwhile, around 150 French Special Forces soldiers have replaced US troops based in the southern Afghan border town of Spin Boldak, an AFP correspondent observed Tuesday. Since the start of August, French troops have been installed in a discreet base on the outskirts of Spin Boldak, Kandahar province, close to the border with Pakistan.

They have taken over from US Special Forces, who have returned to their base in Kandahar city, local officials said. The elite French troops are “to take part, under US operational control and under the command of the chief of staff of the French Army, in the war against remnants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda,” said a French Army staff source in Paris, contacted by telephone from Afghanistan.

Their operational area covers the whole of the Spin Boldak frontier region, according to district chief Syeed Faizaluddin Agha.

French military on the spot refused to comment on the identity of the elite units deployed. Around 20 militiamen are employed by the French at the back of their base, where at least two US liaison officers are also posted, according to district official Said Mohammad Jan.

Spin Boldak is an important area of operations against suspected Taliban, their al-Qaeda allies and other anti-government insurgents An American soldier died of wounds after fighting in eastern Afghanistan, the fourth US fatality in just over a month in operations against the Taliban and Al Qaeda militants in Afghanistan, the US military said on Tuesday. Two US soldiers were wounded and two opposing fighters were killed in the fighting on Monday near Shkin in Paktika province close to the Pakistan border, US military spokesman Colonel Rodney Davis told reporters at the Bagram Air Base. Another spokesman, Major Richard Sater, confirmed the three casualties from the 12,500 allied troops in Afghanistan were Americans. —AFP

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