Monday's news that Afghanistan's Electoral Complaints Commission has stripped President Hamid Karzai of his first-round re-election victory potentially removes the last obstacle cited by the Obama Administration to sending thousands more U.S. troops into the war. White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said over the weekend that reinforcements could not be sent until the allegations of electoral fraud had been resolved, because the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy depends on defending a legitimate government. The electoral commission's ruling that, after fraudulent ballots were discarded, Karzai had failed to win an outright majority in the first round of voting means that he'll have to face a runoff race against his closest challenger, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah. Such a runoff would presumably legitimize the resulting government in the eyes of the Administration.