Elections

The two battling sides in the Honduran crisis have come to an agreement that would allow ousted President Manuel Zelaya to return to office, after a parliamentary vote and with the prior approval of the Supreme Court.

Also included in the deal are terms for a power sharing government, an agreement to respect the results of November 29 elections, and the establishment of a trust commission to weigh in on how the crisis started in the first place.

A U.S. delegation has been in Tagucigalpa since Wednesday, led by Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs Tom Shannon, principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Craig Kelly, and National Security Council Senior Director for Western Hemisphere Affairs Dan Restrepo.

Zelaya was deposed June 28 by force and replaced with a de facto regime led by Roberto Micheletti. Zelaya snuck back into Honduras last month and has been hiding out in the Brazilian embassy in Tagucigalpa ever since.

Here are Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's congratulatory remarks, delivered while traveling in Pakistan:

I'm very pleased to announce that we've had a breakthrough in negotiations in Honduras.

I want to congratulate the people of Honduras as well as President Zelaya and Mr. Micheletti for reaching an historic agreement. I also congratulate Costa Rican President Oscar Arias for the important role he has played in fashioning the San Jose process and the OAS for its role in facilitating the successful round of talks.

As you know, I sent Assistant Secretary Tom Shannon and his deputy Craig Kelly and the White House NSC representative for the Western Hemisphere Dan Ristreppo to Honduras yesterday after speaking with both President Zelaya and Mr. Micheletti last Friday to urge them finally, once and for all to reach an agreement.

I cannot think of another example of a country in Latin America that having suffered a rupture of its democratic and constitutional order overcame such a crisis through negotiation and dialogue.

This is a big step forward for the Inter-American system and its commitment to democracy as embodied in the Inter-American Democratic Charter. I'm very proud that I was part of the process, that the United States was instrumental in the process. But I'm mostly proud of the people of Honduras who have worked very hard to have this matter resolved peacefully.

We're looking forward to the elections that will be held on November 29, and working with the people and government of Honduras to realize the full return of democracy and a better future for the Honduran people.

In which we scour the transcript of the State Department's daily presser so you don't have to. Here are the highlights of today and yesterday's briefings by spokesman Ian Kelly:

• The Afghanistan Electoral Complain Commission has begun sorting through the complaints of election fraud, which will go on for an undetermined time, after which the Independent Elections Commission will weigh in and, well, you get the picture (Don't hold your breath). "It's important that we allow the ECC and IEC the time they need to eliminate the fraud that they have discovered," said Kelly, "The publication of those final and certified results will tell us whether there's a need for a second round."
• The Taliban are not a domestic indigenous group that can be tolerated, somehow less dangerous than al-Qaeda, Kelly said, adding they do pose a treat to the United States and its allies. "I think what we're fighting there is this whole idea of destruction and mass murder in the name of religious extremism. And I would put them all in the same category. They're using the same tactics."
• Kelly rejected the idea that the State Department failed to do the spade work to make sure the Kerry-Lugar Pakistan aid package would be well received in Pakistan, after severe criticism emerged from Islamabad. "I think what we're seeing is a debate and a diversity of opinion in the Pakistani parliament. We welcome this kind of debate," he said.
• Middle East Envoy George Mitchell was in Israel today and met with President Shimon Peres and with Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Tomorrow he will meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
• The U.N. Goldstone Report is "not on the agenda" of the now moved-up October 14 Security Council meeting, but "we have to assume" that Libya is going to bring it up, Kelly said. "it would be impossible to prevent it from being raised, impossible, because any member can raise whatever subject they want," he added..
• Undersecretary of State William Burns met today in Washington with Prince Nayef, Saudi undersecretary of the Ministry of Interior, who's in charge of combating terrorism.
• The second Russian city that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will visit next week is... Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan!

Former Ambassador Peter Galbraith, who was removed today as the second highest ranking U.N. official in Afghanistan, gives a behind the scenes account of his dismissal in an interview with The Cable.

Chiefly, he blames his former longtime friend and boss Kai Eide, the U.N.'s top official in Kabul, for demanding that the U.N. remove Galbraith after differences between them over how to handle fraud in the Afghan elections spilled over into the press.

"Basically, it's my understanding that Kai told the U.N. leadership 'he goes or I go,'" Galbraith said, adding "It was clear that Kai had been lobbying strongly against my return" to Afghanistan after Galbraith took a leave from his post there earlier this month.

Galbraith was surprised to hear he had been sacked, especially since he and Eide had agreed on a specific time he would return to Afghanistan and because he had not been told anything and had to call in to the U.N. undersecretary general for peacekeeping to learn of his dismissal.

Eide, who long ago had introduced Galbraith to his wife, turned on him after their long running and multi-faceted dispute over how to handle the fraud discovered in the election became a public issue.

"He's hyper sensitive against the press coverage," Galbraith said of Eide, "And at some point he decided he had enough of me and he wanted me gone."

Although the differences between the two were many, he said, one key difference was over how to handle what Galbraith calls "ghost polling centers," mostly in the southern part of the country, where Galbraith said massive fraud took place.

"These ghost polling centers had no pollsters, never opened, but had huge potential for fraud and in fact the fraud took place at these polling centers," Galbraith said.

Additionally, Galbraith alleges that Eide refused to hand over to the electoral complaints commission massive evidence that their staff had collected about actual incidents of vote fraud. Staff was frustrated that their evidence was going to waste after they put themselves at risk to collect it, he said.

Another major dispute was over whether the independent election commission would abandon its published safeguards against fraud in the wake of the disputed election. Galbraith wanted those standards upheld but Afghan President Hamid Karzai protested and Eide sided with Karzai, Galbraith explained.

A senior U.S. diplomat told The Cable that Eide's repeated resistance to stronger anti-fraud measures both before and after the election was because his influence was directly tied to his relationship with Karzai.

"It's a classic case of clientilism," the diplomat said.

Galbraith said that his relationship with Eide broke down in mid September, when Eide returned from a trip away from Afghanistan and determined he and Galbraith weren't on the same page.

"He had no confidence that I would carry out his orders and I had no confidence in his leadership," said Galbraith.

Looking ahead, Galbraith said the U.N. can still play a constructive role in Afghanistan and that the process of examining sample ballots should move forward.

But, Galbraith quickly added, "If you don't have a run-off election, the crisis continues."

Official Washington is laying low and saying little as tectonic plates appear to be shifting in the run-up to Iran's presidential elections, to be held Friday.

Despite dramatic images this week of the largest campaign demonstrations taking place in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, including a human chain of as many as a million supporters for former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, the leading opposition candidate, the Obama administration has remained largely silent. The last thing officials want to do is say anything to jinx a process underway in Iran whose outcome is entirely outside of their control -- and yet may ease one of their most pressing challenges.

A Mousavi win would not mean smooth sailing for Washington's efforts to engage Iran, analysts caution. It could deepen fissures in the Iranian leadership or even prompt a hard-line backlash or crackdown that could further paralyze U.S. efforts to engage Iran, they say. But the voting out of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would undoubtedly be seen in Washington and the West as a welcome sign that the Iranian public supports greater liberalization and a less hostile attitude toward the West.

"We are committed to direct diplomacy with whatever government emerges," a U.S. official said Wednesday on condition of anonymity. The administration is "being tight-lipped on this one," he acknowledged, noting that some planned interviews on the issue had been shut down out of apparent sensitivity to concerns that Iranian hard-liners could portray them as evidence of U.S. meddling, a sensitive issue in Iran.

 "We take what we get," a White House official said Monday, seeking to downplay the import of the outcome of Iran's polls. "It's clear the Iranian president has limited influence, either for better or for worse," he said. "So even were Ahmadinejad to lose, there will not suddenly be flowers blooming" in Washington's efforts to engage Iran.

"They have nothing to gain by suggesting that they favor any outcome," explained Brookings Institution Iran expert Suzanne Maloney, a former State Department policy planning official, referring to the U.S. government. "One can't plan for what the outcome will be," Maloney added. "It will be decided for us. What impact it has on the process for negotiations [between Washington and Tehran] will play out for weeks, if not months."

"It's not simply that the outcome is unpredictable," Maloney continued. "It's that the impact is not wholly straightforward. You could have a reformist win that revives a power struggle that returns the Iranian position on engagement to one dominated by paralysis."

Asked if the political status quo in Iran has already led to paralysis on reciprocating U.S. outreach, Maloney responded, "You don't have factions really battling each other over America right now. Because [Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei has endorsed the idea of talks, even Ahmadinejad has advanced the idea of talks. [The issue is] not the same kind of political football as during the Khatami presidency." (Moderate cleric's Mohammed Khatami's surprise win in Iran's 1997 presidential elections initially ushered in a period of reforms, liberalization and civil liberties in Iran but was soon overshadowed by assassination of regime critics and crackdowns on student protests as hard-liners pushed back against what they saw as threats to the system.)

Four presidential candidates are running in Iran's presidential elections, scheduled for Friday June 12 (read FP's primer on the candidates here). If no clear winner gains a simple majority, then it would go to a second-round runoff between the top two candidates on June 19.

Some analysts are now saying events seem to be moving so quickly that Mousavi might win in a first round. "Something is happening, without a doubt," said Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council Tuesday. "I promised myself not to get excited, and I really don't want to overstate it. But it may just be one round, with Ahmadinejad losing, which was unthinkable two weeks ago."

The turning point, analysts say, was a series of unprecedented televised presidential debates, the first ever in Iran, that began June 3 and were watched by an estimated 40 million Iranians. But there have been other remarkable events as well, including the mass demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of supporters for rival candidates and the human chain on Tehran's main freeway, Ahmadinejad pulling out an intelligence file during his presidential debate with Mousavi, accusing Mousavi's wife of having bypassed entrance exams to get into a Ph.D. program, and a stunning letter yesterday from former Iranian President Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani imploring the supreme leader for clean elections and to muzzle Ahmadinejad's attacks. Ahmadinejad has accused Rafsanjani and his sons of corruption, as well as of being behind efforts to mobilize opposition against his reelection.

"[I]t would be a mistake to read [Rafsanjani's letter] as an act of a man defending himself against accusations by a reckless candidate who wants to be reelected at all costs," wrote Mehdi Semati, an Iran expert at Eastern Illinois University to a Gulf-oriented listserv. "Rafsanjani is saying what many people in Iran are thinking: Ahmadinejad, in effect, has questioned the entire 30-year history of the revolution, since he has depicted Mousavi's era, Rafsanjani's era, and then Khatami's era as corrupt to the core. For most educated observers in Iran, this has caused a crisis of legitimacy for the IRI [Islamic Republic of Iran]. It has caused many religious and conservative folks with commitments to the revolution to express concern.

"It is possible that Rafsanjani is subtly reminding the supreme leader and others that there is such a thing as Assembly of Experts, a body headed by Rafsanjani, whose job it is to appoint the supreme leader," Semati added.

Although it's the economy -- and not foreign policy - that dominates Iran's campaign debates, Semati told Foreign Policy, "The nice thing about the complaints against Ahmadinejad -- that he is reckless, adventurist, incompetent, angry, etc. -- is that the voters then see why his performance in the foreign policy arena is, by implication even when it is not explicitly stated, jeopardizing the IRI," Semati said. "Rafsanjani has tapped into this anxiety with his letter, and I believe it is shared by many across the political spectrum. The Holocaust denial is widely believed to have damaged Iranian nation's dignity, respect, and standing in the world. It is one thing Mousavi and [fellow candidate Mehdi] Karroubi mentioned early on."

Semati said that a campaign video by another presidential candidate, former Revolutionary Guards Corps commander Mohsen Rezai, "was a blistering attack on Ahmadinejad's style, competence, and wisdom ... One of the statement's that struck me in this video was that Rezai, through years of his military experience, knows war is hell ... and he will do all that he can to avoid it. .... I think the ball is in the supreme leader's corner." Rezai is expected to drain some votes away from Ahmadinejad among hawkish voters.

Maloney cautioned not to underestimate Ahmadinejad's sophistication and the appeal to his core constituency -- the Revolutionary Guard, elements of the rural poor, who he has doled money out to, and some conservative Islamist traditionalists -- as well as the obvious benefits of running as the incumbent. "He controls the elections headquarters," Maloney said. "He doles money out in ways that help his chances. And he's not as much of a rube as outside analysts tend to believe. He's very sophisticated. His rhetoric appeals to his core constituency. The roadblock for him is if he can play around the edges of that."

Other Washington Iran watchers said they were already anticipating a Mousavi victory -- as well as the complications of a power struggle within the regime over a reformist win. "People are anxiously hopeful because they don't want to repeat the Khatami experience," said Mariam Memarsadeghi, an Iranian American who has advised Washington NGOs on Middle East civil society programs. But she observed differences with the Khatami era too. "Reading the vibes from the demonstrations, I would think people are getting this excited because they hope and plan and think that this level of mobilization will be there post-election. Unlike the Khatami era, they are not so much behind the person [of Mousavi], as behind their own demands."

Demands for what? "Liberalization, a more forward thinking government, they want civil liberties -- they want the whole gamut," Memarsadeghi said. "But they can't have the whole gamut in ... the system as it is. That's the Catch 22. That would be the real change: If the mobilization of the people and the elections causes internal fissures within the regime to grow deeper."

But such internal fissures could paralyze a political system that needs a certain level of consensus to function, according to Parsi. "[The Iranian leadership] may simply be too divided and involved in trying to heal rifts to be able to deal with the United States," he said.

The campaign itself may have already made returning to the Ahmadinejad-era status quo untenable. "It will be very difficult for the hard-liners to put this genie back in the bottle I think," one U.S. Iran hand said on condition of anonymity Tuesday.

"There is every evidence that Ahmadinejad has now dug himself in so deeply that he won't be able to crawl out," said veteran former NSC Iran hand Gary Sick, who writes a blog on Iran issues and teaches at Columbia University. "Rafsanjani's letter ... is unique in the history of the IRI. I have no idea how all of this will play out, but I think it is a turning point in the revolution, since it really goes to the heart of the role of the leader."

HAMID FOROUTAN/AFP/Getty Images