KARZAI WINS MANDATE FOR OFFENSIVE ON WARLORDS AND DRUGS TRADE

Hamid Karzai has been officially named winner of the Afghan election,
becoming the country's first leader to be elected by the people and putting
him in a strong position for a confrontation with the country's warlords
and a promised offensive against the booming drugs trade.

The result has been obvious for a couple of weeks and was widely predicted
long before polling day on 9 October. It could not be confirmed until
yesterday, however, when a fraud inquiry team reported that the minor
electoral corruption and technical errors it found were not serious enough
to sour the victory.

Mr Karzai, who has been heavily backed by the United States since he was
appointed President in 2001, won decisively with 55 per cent of the vote
and wide geographic and ethnic support. Tony Blair was quick to
congratulate Mr Karzai, calling the elections "a tremendous achievement for
the Afghan people".

However, Mr Karzai's nearest rival, the former education minister Yunus
Qanooni, refused to concede defeat. Mr Qanooni, 39 points behind Mr Karzai
in the poll, has, however, won little popular support for his refusal to
accept the result.

Mr Karzai was in the United Arab Emirates yesterday, where his spokesman
said he was "very glad to finally have the result we wanted". He added: "We
are starting a new life, a new Afghanistan and we hope everyone with
co-operate with its reconstruction."

Afghans voted in huge numbers despite the threat of terrorist attack,
overwhelmingly because they believed that the election was a chance to end
the warfare and lawlessness that has plagued them for more than two
decades. Their expectations of what Mr Karzai must achieve are now sky-high.

He has promised action to tackle the burgeoning opium trade, which Western
diplomats fear could turn Afghanistan into a narco-state, deal with Taliban
remnants, who he has offered to bring into the mainstream of politics, and
cut down the power of warlords, which he has highlighted as Afghanistan's
most serious problem. Both Afghans and Mr Karzai's Western supporters will
be watching carefully to see who is appointed in the President's new
cabinet, which is not expected to be announced for several weeks.

Of particular interest will be whether tainted strongmen and figures who
are reputed to be deeply involved in the drugs trade are appointed. Some
leading members of his cabinet have dreadful human rights records dating
back to the civil war in the 1990s and it has been an open secret in Kabul
that some are key players in the drugs trade.

Afghans on the street and analysts were divided on whether Mr Karzai would
take decisive action against strongmen whose private armies have not yet
been disarmed. The President has acquired a reputation for timidity and
preferring compromise to confrontation with warlords. But before the
election he signalled a new willingness to get tough by dropping the
defence minister and pushing a powerful warlord out of his bastion in the
western city of Herat.

Mr Karzai's victory has, however, been overshadowed by Kabul's first
hostage crisis. The Taliban splinter group that has threatened to kill
three UN hostages it claims to be holding yesterday pushed back a deadline
on which it is threatening to kill them from last night to Friday.

Jaish-al Muslimeen claims to be holding Annetta Flanigan, from Armagh in
Northern Ireland, Angelito Nayan, a Filipino diplomat, and Shqipe Habibi
from Kosovo. It says that it will execute them unless the UN pulls out of
Afghanistan.

The government has previously negotiated the release of several foreign
nationals who were kidnapped by Taliban fugitives, in return for a ransom.
The three latest hostages were, however, snatched from a busy Kabul street
last Thursday, sparking fears that Afghan militants were copying the
tactics of insurgents in Iraq.

Neither the United Nations nor the Afghan government would comment on the
hostage situation yesterday.