“There’ll be disputes, as there are in American elections. We only picked a senator from Minnesota just a few weeks ago after rather lengthy delay,” Richard Holbrooke said during a panel discussion at a Washington think tank. “We aren’t going to know on the evening of Aug. 20 who won. CNN is not going to call this election. ... All 41 candidates may call it. The process will take a while.”

If neither Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who’s seeking re-election, nor any of the other candidates gets 50 percent of the vote, the Afghan constitution requires a runoff. But it could take days or weeks just for the first count of the first round of votes in the largely undeveloped country, which Holbrooke noted is the world’s poorest outside of Africa.

Speaking at the liberal Center for American Progress, the U.S. envoy said that thousands of outside observers will be in Afghanistan to assess the vote, but that some level of disagreement about the results is still likely.

“Will there be challenge to the elections there are in every other democracy? I think we should assume those,” he said.

Asked who’ll ultimately assess the legitimacy of the election, Holbrooke said, “It ends up being the media. ... All of what happens in any distant places is, in the end, reduced to the simple headlines of media.”

Holbrooke declined to comment on reports that U.S. commanders in the region are on the verge of requesting more troops. A “vast array” of civilian programs to boost economic development, agriculture and the police are waiting for the election to be settled, he said.

On the subject of timelines, Holbrooke seemed to take a different tack than a British military official who recently suggested NATO troops might remain in Afghanistan for decades.

“The military part of this struggle with American troops is not an open-ended event,” Holbrooke said. “But our assistance — our civilian assistance is going to continue for a long time.”

The Obama administration is about to announce formal benchmarks to assess progress in Afghanistan, but Holbrooke suggested that the focus on so-called “metrics” had gotten a bit excessive.

“I would say this about defining success in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” he said: “We’ll know it when we see it.”

The effort to strengthen the central and regional governments in Afghanistan against the Taliban insurgency would be aided by the Obama administration’s decision to lift some security rules that made it difficult for U.S. diplomats and development personnel to leave the fortified U.S. embassy compound in Kabul, Holbrooke said.

“You no longer need 72-hour prior permission to leave the compound,” Holbrooke said. “You don’t need any permission at all — you just notify people where you’re going.”

“It made no sense to any of us when we came in,” he explained. “We send people over there, and we put them under restraints — they can’t work…We have to protect them, but we are doing it to give them much more discretion.”

Holbrooke also said the reported killing of Pakistan-based Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud by a CIA drone was a major victory for the U.S., Pakistani and Afghan governments.

“The end of Baitullah Mehsud, as we all know, is a very big deal,” Holbrooke said. “Baitullah Mehsud was sort of like an independent subsidiary of Al Qaeda.”

And Holbrooke said the apparent death of Mehsud appears to have thrown Taliban militants in Pakistan’s tribal regions into disarray.

“Everyone is thrashing around,” Holbrooke said. “There are unconfirmed reports of a shootout during a leadership meeting.”