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Even as Afghan incumbent Hamid Karzai was declared the winner of the presidential elections, a UN-backed election commission announced today that there was clear evidence of widespread fraud. An unnamed senior Western diplomat told the New York Times that as many as 800 fake polling sites turned in hundreds of thousands of votes for Karzai on election day, calling it “fraud en masse.” As a result, the US/NATO occupation faces a crisis of legitimacy as it backs a corrupt government increasingly not accepted by the population. Adding to that, a recent airstrike carried out by US troops but called in by German soldiers, killed almost a hundred people last Friday. Two fuel tankers hijacked by Taliban in Kunduz province were the reported targets of the attack. An Afghan policeman reported, however, that as many as forty civilians siphoning fuel from one of the tankers may have been among those killed. NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen acknowledged the possibility of civilian deaths resulting from the strike and pledged that an investigation into the matter was already being conducted. The attack came after a Pentagon briefing on Thursday centered on a confidential report by top NATO commander General Stanley McChrystal assessing the Afghan war and laying the groundwork to request more troops.

GUEST: Rick Reyes, co-founding member of Veterans for Rethinking Afghanistan, served in Afghanistan and Iraq and testified to the US Congress about the Afghanistan war. Just returned from Afghanistan.

Find out more at www.ivaw.org and www.rethinkafghanistan.com.