The White House has accepted President Karzai as the winner in the Afghan Presidential election despite evidence that up to 20 per cent of ballots cast may have been fraudulent, media reports from Washington said on Tuesday

Obama Administration has conceded that Karzai will be resident for another five years on the basis that even if he were forced into a second round of voting he would almost certainly win it.

The decision will increase pressure on President Obama to justify further US troop deployments to Afghanistan to prop up a regime now regarded as systemically corrupt.

The acceptance was conveyed by Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, in a meeting with her Afghan counterpart hours before President Obama received a formal request from General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, for up to 40,000 more troops.

Clinton told Rangin Dadfar Spanta, the Afghan Foreign Minister, that she and her Nato colleagues — including David Miliband, the British Foreign Secretary — had reached a consensus that Karzai would remain President even if investigations now under way cut his share of the first-round vote to below 50 per cent.

The meeting took place last Friday but details emerged Monday, the Times reported.

The  US Administration has also told Kabul that it will support what Karzai calls a policy of “reconciliation”, which is intended to induce low and mid-ranking Taleban fighters into swapping sides or at least to lay down their arms.

The same tactic, which boils down to paying fighters to leave the insurgency, is central to a new counter-insurgency strategy recommended by General McChrystal in a bleak assessment of Afghan security leaked
last week.

The effort is modelled on the “Sons of Iraq” movement that proved critical to the success of the US-led surge in Iraq two years ago.