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The inauguration of a new Parliament in just weeks threatens to worsen ethnic tensions and instability and to drive an important part of President Hamid Karzai’s political base into the arms of the insurgency, Afghans and foreign officials warn.
Despite numerous obstacles, NATO and American officials had pushed strongly for parliamentary elections in September, gambling that a successful vote would show progress in the war and new growth in Afghanistan’s democracy.
Instead insecurity, disaffection and fraud, particularly in the south, left the country’s largest and most important ethnic group, the Pashtuns, with sharply reduced representation. The results have been vigorously disputed for three months and have pushed the country to the brink of a constitutional crisis.
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