By Dexter Filkins and Carlotta Gall
''We think that about 15 per cent of the polling sites never opened on election day,'' the senior Western diplomat said. ''But they still managed to report thousands of ballots for Karzai.''
AFGHAN election workers loyal to President Hamid Karzai set up hundreds of fictitious polling sites where no one voted but still registered hundreds of thousands of ballots towards the President's re-election, according to senior Western and Afghan officials.
Up to 800 fake centres existed only on paper, said a senior Western diplomat in Afghanistan who spoke on condition of anonymity. But local workers reported that hundreds, sometimes thousands, of votes for Mr Karzai in the election last month came from each of those places. Another Western official in Afghanistan confirmed this.
''We think that about 15 per cent of the polling sites never opened on election day,'' the senior Western diplomat said. ''But they still managed to report thousands of ballots for Karzai.''
Besides creating the fake sites, Mr Karzai's supporters also took over about 800 legitimate polling centres and used them to report fraudulently tens of thousands of additional votes for Mr Karzai, the officials said.
The result, the officials said, is that in some provinces, the number of votes reported in favour of Mr Karzai may exceed the number of people who voted by a factor of 10.
''We are talking about orders of magnitude,'' the senior Western diplomat said.
The widening accounts of fraud pose a stark problem for the Obama Administration, which has deployed 68,000 American soldiers to help reverse gains by Taliban insurgents.
US officials hoped that the election would help turn Afghans away from the Taliban by giving them a greater voice in government. Instead, the Obama Administration faces the prospect of having to defend for the next five years an Afghan government widely seen as illegitimate.
''This was fraud en masse,'' the Western diplomat said.
The revelations came as British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and German Chancellor Angela Merkel unveiled plans for an international conference on Afghanistan as pressure mounts over their countries' involvement in the war against the Taliban.
Mr Brown and Dr Merkel want the conference to take place under UN auspices before the end of the year and to address the issues of security, governance and development.
Dr Merkel said she spoke to NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen about the initiative and also gained informal US backing.
The conference, involving contributor nations, the next Afghan government, the UN and NATO would ''look ahead at the next phase of our mission'', Mr Brown said. The aim was to ''see how the Afghan population itself, its army, its police force and civic institutions can play a bigger role in the future and to ensure our strategy is properly supported by the resources''.
The two leaders are facing calls to justify their troops' presence in Afghanistan amid a rising death toll and civilian casualties. Britain has the second-biggest troop contingent in Afghanistan after the US and Germany the third-biggest.
Mr Brown said he was confident of support for the conference among all 41 members of the NATO-led alliance battling the Taliban and their ''guerilla warfare'' tactics. Dr Merkel said that French President Nicolas Sarkozy backed the move, and that it would take account of a report by US Army general Stanley McChrystal, NATO's top commander in Afghanistan.
''It concerns the security of the country, improving the leadership of the country and the introduction of the rule of law,'' Dr Merkel said. ''It's our view that the Afghan Government should take over more responsibilities.''
President Karzai leads his main rival Abdullah Abdullah by 48.6 per cent to 31.7 per cent, according to partial results published on the Election Commission website. Dr Merkel, facing elections on September 27, is under pressure after scores died in an air strike called in by German commanders.