"Afghanistan's parliament elected a former Uzbek warlord as speaker on Sunday, ending a month of squabbling over the position that has further undermined the credibility of an assembly tainted by electoral fraud. The endorsement of Abdul Rahoof Ibrahimi clears the way for the assembly - a disparate collection of 249 individual lawmakers rather than coherent political parties - to begin legislating five months after a parliamentary vote. But parliament is struggling with the fallout from an election in September that was marred by fraud and prompted a court challenge backed by President Hamid Karzai that threatens dozens of sitting MPs. The political battle is undermining the West's efforts to foster good governance as it starts handing over control of security to Afghan forces and withdrawing many of the 150,000 NATO-led troops by 2014. Ibrahimi, a little-known politician who is reported to have supported Karzai's re-election in 2009, is a member of Afghanistan's Uzbek minority and fought with the insurgent group Hizb-ul-Islami Gulbuddin (HiG) against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s."