KABUL: Ballots from about 10 per cent of Afghan polling stations will be recounted because of fraud concerns, officials said today.

It could take weeks to complete the process, a senior vote official said, plunging Afghanistan deeper into political limbo as Western troops battle to fend off an increasingly lethal Taliban insurgency.

Nearly a month after the polls, President Hamid Karzai leads an incomplete count with 54.3 per cent of the vote. But his main rival Abdullah Abdullah — trailing with 28.1 per cent — is calling for a run-off as fraud claims mount.

One Western official close to the process said that most of the suspicious ballots were likely from Karzai’s southern strongholds and the recount could affect the final result if all the ballots under audit were thrown out.

The UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) last week ordered that ballots from polling stations with “clear and convincing evidence of fraud” be audited and recounted before deciding whether to exclude the votes.

“About 2,500 plus polling stations are affected by the order and all provinces are affected,” said ECC chairman Grant Kippen.

The order said the Independent Election Commission (IEC) must identify polling stations with 100 per cent turnout or where one presidential candidate received more than 95 percent of the count.

IEC spokesman Noor Mohammad Noor confirmed the recount order from the ECC, adding: “We have no problem with this recount. It has already started.” Electoral authorities said more than 25,000 polling stations opened

for the August 20 presidential and provincial council elections, seen as a key

test of Western-backed efforts to rebuild the shattered country.

But the polls, Afghanistan’s second presidential election and the first organised by Afghans, were marred by low turnout and widespread fraud claims, which have pushed back the scheduled

announcement of the new president.

The drawn-out process has raised tensions, as more than 100,000 US and NATO troops battle a Taliban militia bent on destabilising the Western-backed Afghan government and local security forces.

“The idea is to do it as quickly as possible, so hopefully weeks as opposed to months is what we are looking at,” said Kippen of the audit and recount.

Analysts and officials warned that most of the suspicious polling stations were in areas beset by the insurgency. An audit could therefore take “a long, long time,” said one IEC official on condition of anonymity.

“Now we are entering the phase of political confrontation,” said Haroun Mir, analyst from the Afghanistan Centre for Research and Policy Studies. “We are heading for a political impasse.”

Mir said ballots from 10 per cent of polling stations were unlikely to affect the final results.