What price freedom? Let's survey the Afghans

Hamid Karzai was re-elected Afghan president by default. Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai's opponent in the Nov. 7 runoff, dropped out of the race Sunday so the Independent Election Commission declared Karzai the winner.

This deprives Karzai a legitimate victory at the polls, which would seem to undermine confidence in his leadership.

Then again, there's no guarantee that the results of the runoff would have been any more reliable than the August election, which was rife with fraud. Nearly one-third of Karzai's votes were fraudulent, according to a review backed by the United Nations.

Declaring Karzai the winner of the election further muddies the water for the Obama administration. U.S. commander on the ground Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal has asked for tens of thousands of additional troops to support a counter-insurgency strategy. The goal is to protect Afghans from the Taliban.

It was the Taliban, after all, that likely drove Abdullah to drop out of the race. Taliban leaders had threatened attacks against anyone who took part in the election.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visited Afghanistan on Monday to congratulate Karzai. "Afghanistan now faces significant challenges and the new president must move swiftly to form a government that is able to command the support of both the Afghan people and the international community," Ban said.

Neither seems likely. The people of Afghanistan didn't need a U.N. report to tell them that their August election was a sham. They're supposed to support a president whose administration was incapable of conducting a fair election?

Some of the worst fraud and voter intimidation came at the expense of women voters.

Men ferried hundreds of voting cards purportedly filled out by women to polling places where the ballots were accepted, no questions asked. One man reportedly cast 35 votes on behalf of female relatives.

Among women who wanted to visit polling places to cast ballots themselves, many could not because men staffed more than 3,500 women's polling places because the government could not find enough women to fill the positions. (Muslim men and women do not mix in public.)

Afghan women are supposed to buy into five more years under Karzai under these conditions?

And the international community is supposed to support Karzai's government through aid and, in the United States' case, a stepped-up military commitment to provide an alternative to the Taliban?