JOHN HOCKENBERRY, for The Takeaway: So we learned this yesterday from the communications department at the United Nations -- the secretary general has decided to recall Mr. Peter Galbraith from Afghanistan and to end his appointment as the deputy special representative of the secretary general for the U.N. assistance mission in Afghanistan. He expresses his thanks to Mr. Galbraith for his hard work and professional dedication.

Peter Galbraith joins us now, he is the former U.N. envoy to Afghanistan. It occurs to me, Peter, in the midst of Hamid Karzai attempting to be re-elected in the middle of a total strategy change going on between the U.S. and NATO in Afghanistan, that this is particularly oddly timed, your dismissal here, and good morning to you ... from Vermont.

PETER GALBRAITH: Good morning, John. Setting aside the personal issues involved, I couldn't agree with that statement more. First, as a general matter, I think it sends a very odd signal to dismiss a senior U.N. official because he was concerned about fraud in a U.N.-supported and U.N.-funded election. But here we are, in the critical week, 10-day period that a rather controversial recount procedure is under way, in an environment in which, frankly, many Afghans, and certainly the Afghan opposition has no confidence in the leader of the U.N. mission that they think, rightly, that he's biased towards the president. And they've seen me as the person who was pushing for a fair count and for making sure that all was done possible to deal with the fraud.

HOCKENBERRY: Alright, Peter Galbraith, let's just focus on that very clearly. What evidence do you have that the reason you were dismissed was because you wanted to speak out about the evidence of fraud in the Karzai government, and in this election? And secondly, the U.N. would say, you just couldn't get along with your boss, Kai Eide?

GALBRAITH: Well, let me begin by saying that I did not want to speak out publicly about the fraud, and I did not speak out publicly about the fraud. This was a private disagreement between me and the head of the mission; it was a long-running policy dispute about how to deal with it, which unfortuneately, through no fault of either of us, became public when somebody leaked the fact I had left Kabul to a British newspaper. And now, as evidence of this, we actually, I had agreed with the United Nations that they would issue a statement yesterday which stated the truth, which is that I had left or had been recalled because of a disagreement about electoral fraud. That was not the statement they issued. They then began to background this to suggest that it was a personality dispute, which it was not. Incidentally, the head of the mission has been a friend of mine since 1994, we worked together in the Balkans when I was ambassador to Croatia and he was deputy to my counterpart, Thorvald Stoltenberg. We vacationed together in the Adriatic, he introduced me to my Norwegian wife, so we had a good personal relationship, but we had a profound disagreement about policy.

HOCKENBERRY: So let's talk about what the implications are for this disagreement. Why would the United Nations want to project that it was anything other than independent on the matter of the election campaign in Afghanistan right in the middle of a conflict that's going on there? It seems to send the message that Washington is pulling the strings at the United Nations? I don't know what it sends.

GALBRAITH: Well, first, I don't think this reflects President Obama's policy, and indeed, the United States has been quite forward in wanting to have genuinely free and fair elections. And so, too, has the United Nations. The position that I took was really not mine; it was the position that represented the views of the entire professional staff of the United Nations mission that were working on the elections. There was no division in the United Nation mission on this. They were all taking the same view as me; the only exception was at the head, and of course the head is the one who gets to call the shots.

HOCKENBERRY: Alright, then, the question becomes, and again I'm just scratching my head, Peter, and we've talked before on all kinds of subjects, and I know your long experience in the diplomatic corps... but what kind of magic does Hamid Karzai have that he can survive despite all of these accusations, the problems he's had with warlords, even ran with a warlord as his running mate in this election campaign?

GALBRAITH: That is one of the questions that we don't know the answer to. But I want to say that the position that I took has nothing to do with whether Hamid Karzai or somebody else should be president of Afghanistan. It is much more basic, which is that the people of Afghanistan voted on the 20th of August -- in parts of the country they took considerable personal risk to go vote -- and they deserve to have their votes counted honestly, and the results not be marred by the inclusion of well over a million fraudulent votes.

HOCKENBERRY: Is it possible, though, you know I have to ask this, that perhaps you may have allowed your ego to get in the way of this issue of the people who voted in Afghanistan, and that someone who could have been an advocate is now out of the United Nations because of personnel issues that really sort of exploded in your face?

GALBRAITH: Well, I don't understand, how did my ego get in the way?

HOCKENBERRY: That you pushed this too far. That if you were still there, you could actually have more of an impact.

GALBRAITH: John, in fact my involvement on this was rather low-key. I was hardly an activist. The final straw on this was a call that I made to chief electoral officer when the so-called "Independent Afghan Election Commission"

HOCKENBERRY: ... right ...

GALBRAITH: ... was about to make a decision to abandon the safeguards which would exclude fraudulent ballots.

HOCKENBERRY: Understood. I had to ask, Peter, I had to ask. That was a great laying-out of what's going on in Afghanistan. Peter Galbraith, former U.N. envoy to Afghanistan, talking about the conditions and circumstances of his dismissal.