By the looks of it, the ceremony that unfolded last week inside the Presidential Palace in Kabul was marking a joyous, even triumphant, occasion. President Hamid Karzai, flanked by American senator John Kerry and an array of Western ambassadors, had just announced that he would accept the revised vote totals showing that he had not won re-election after all. The president’s decision meant the Afghan election would go to a second round.

A few minutes later, Karzai, Kerry and the diplomats filed off the stage, and election workers around the country began preparing new sheaves of ballots. In Afghanistan, you take your victories where you can get them, even if, as was the case in Kabul last week, victory amounts to little more than a catastrophe averted.

Karzai, after all, only agreed to abide by the laws of his own country. A United Nations-backed panel had nullified nearly a million ballots counted in Karzai’s favour following an election on August 20.

Karzai had vigorously resisted the panel’s findings. It was only Senator Kerry’s relentless efforts, and round-the-clock lobbying by American and European leaders, that staved off political disaster. Eight years after the American-led coalition pushed the Taliban from Kabul, democracy in Afghanistan is still a very fragile thing.

The political deadlock—precipitated first by the fraud and then by Karzai’s refusal to recognise it—unfolded just as President Obama was debating whether to grant a request by his chief field commander here, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, to dispatch as many as 40,000 additional troops.

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