Afghan president says opponents welcome in gov't

Karzai did say that he needs international support and does not want to squander the goodwill of those supplying thousands of troops and funds to Afghanistan.

He said he wants to "make sure that the taxpayers' money coming to us from your countries is spent wisely and rightly by us, the Afghan government, and also by the donors themselves."

The messy end to the election left the United States and its allies with the difficult task of helping the Karzai government restore legitimacy both at home and abroad. Public support for the war is already dropping in the U.S. and other countries with troops in Afghanistan. The image of a fraud-stained Afghan partner does little to reverse the slide.

But those same nations were reticent to go through with a Nov. 7 runoff that risked lives.

Taliban attacks killed dozens during the first round in August, while in some areas, militants cut off the ink-marked fingers of people who had voted.

Organizing enough security to prevent violence in a hastily arranged runoff would have posed a serious challenge for coalition forces in Afghanistan, and some officers commanding NATO forces voiced relief at the vote's cancellation.

Col. Benoit Durieux, who heads the battalion of some 750 French Foreign Legion in the Surobi area east of the capital, said his men could now focus on other tasks.

"We clearly won the first round against the Taliban in terms of securing the elections," Durieux told The Associated Press in the Tora forward operating base, some 40 miles (65 kilometers) east of Kabul. "Why give them the opportunity of a replay?"

The Taliban said last week's suicide bombing of a guesthouse used by U.N. election workers "showed that even they are not safe in Kabul." The attackers killed five U.N. staffers and three Afghans.

It insisted that all decisions about the vote had been taken by Western powers, saying that "the announcement of the election result yesterday showed for the people that all the decisions about the elections were made in Washington and London."

The Taliban regarded the election as a Western plot and had threatened to ramp up attacks on those participating in the runoff.

NATO and Afghan forces had two to three months to prepare the security of the first round on Aug. 20. But organizing a second round in barely two weeks had been viewed as a major challenge, Durieux said. "And the insurgents saw our techniques, our positions during the vote, so they'd have more insight" to try to disrupt a new round of voting, he said.

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