Karzai wins presidential election

Incumbent Hamid Karzai was declared the winner of last month's Afghan presidential election yesterday and now faces the task of forming a government minus the warlords and drug runners who tainted his last cabinet.

For the past three years Mr Karzai has led an interim government installed after US and Afghan resistance forces overthrew the Taliban militia in late 2001 for refusing to handover al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

But Mr Karzai's second cabinet will look very different from his first if he sticks to his word that he will not be forming coalitions with main rivals, characterised as regional strongmen who rely on ethnic loyalties and private militias.

The advent of democracy in this Islamic central Asian country after a quarter century of war, was hailed by President George W. Bush as a foreign policy success as he campaigned for re-election himself.

Zakim Shah, head of the UN-Afghan Joint Electoral Management Body (JEMB), in a broadcast to the nation declared Mr Karzai the winner of Afghanistan's first election of a leader through a direct ballot, saying he had won 55.4 per cent of the vote.

"Therefore, the JEMB... announces his excellency Hamid Karzai the winner of the first election for a president of Afghanistan in the year 1383," Mr Shah said, referring to the current year in the traditional Afghan solar calendar.