Afghan Contenders Accept Results and Move On

By ALISSA J. RUBIN

The two remaining candidates for president of Afghanistan said on Thursday that they accepted the final results of the first round of voting, which eliminated their other rivals, and they vowed to campaign hard to win the election in a runoff.

However, the timeline announced by the nation’s election commission will leave the country without a new president until late summer. Voters will cast their runoff ballots on June 14, with final results to be announced on July 22. Under Afghan election law, the new president would then be inaugurated 30 days later, officials said.

The dates matter to the United States and other Western countries, where military planners are hoping to determine as soon as possible what will happen after the current United Nations mandate for their forces in Afghanistan expires at the end of the year.

Both candidates have said they will sign the bilateral security agreement that has already been negotiated with the United States, and which provides for the continuing presence of American troops. The current president, Hamid Karzai, has refused to sign it before he leaves office, leaving the matter to his successor.

The American ambassador to Afghanistan, James B. Cunningham, issued a statement saying the United States applauded the election results and urged Afghans to hold “a credible, inclusive and transparent” second round. Mr. Cunningham also called on both candidates’ campaigns “neither to commit fraud nor to permit it to be conducted in their names.”

The Independent Election Commission of Afghanistan said the front-runner in the race, Abdullah Abdullah, won 45 percent of the vote in the first round, with Ashraf Ghani second at 31.6 percent; they will meet in the runoff. The third-place candidate, Zalmay Rassoul, won 11.4 percent, and said he would support Mr. Abdullah’s campaign in the runoff.

By the commission’s final count, 7,018,049 Afghans went to the polls in the first round on April 5, about 50 percent more than voted in the previous presidential election, in 2009. The commission’s chairman, Mohammed Yousuf Nuristani, said 64 percent of the voters were men and 36 percent were women.

“My request again of the brave and patriotic people of Afghanistan is to do as they did before, millions of them casting their votes, to go again and cast their votes” in the runoff, Mr. Nuristani said at a news conference Thursday.

Under Afghan law, a candidate must win more than 50 percent of the votes to be elected; if none do so in a first round of voting, a runoff is held. The Independent Election Commission oversees the voting and counting, while a separate body, the Electoral Complaints Commission, adjudicates reports of irregularities and fraud.

In contrast to 2009, when more than 1.2 million votes were found to be fraudulent and were discarded, the two commissions threw out only 375,000 votes this time.

Before the results were announced, Mr. Abdullah had complained about last-minute changes in election rules, improper counting and other aberrations. But on Thursday he chose to take the high road, sounding an almost triumphal note. “Anyway, the story is over — the others are 14 percent or 13.5 percent behind,” Mr. Abdullah said, referring to Mr. Ghani. He added that, with support in the runoff from several candidates who had smaller showings, he expected to win the next round easily.

Mr. Ghani, on the other hand, criticized the complaint commission and said it should have discarded closer to 800,000 votes. He sought to rally his own supporters and those of Mr. Rassoul, saying, “Together, the victory is ours.”

Though Mr. Rassoul threw his personal support to Mr. Abdullah for the runoff, many of his backers did not follow suit. It is difficult to forecast how the runoff will turn out, despite Mr. Abdullah’s substantial lead in the first round. Ethnic fault lines may play a bigger role in the second round than they did in the first.

In particular, Pashtuns, the largest group in the country, see themselves as underrepresented in Kabul, and Mr. Ghani, who is a Pashtun, may be able to tap into that resentment and win votes that were cast for others in the first round. Mr. Abdullah is half Pashtun and half Tajik, but is heavily identified with the Tajik ethnic group.

Whoever wins the runoff had better do so by a wide margin, said a former adviser to one of the campaigns, who asked not to be identified because of sensitive negotiations among candidates.

“There has to be a mega-gap between the winner and the loser for the winner to have a mandate, and for the loser not to turn into a sore loser and create a crisis,” the former adviser said. “If it ends up being 52-48 or 50-48, then that’s not accepted. Three percent is a margin of error in this country.”