By Rod Nordland
KABUL, Afghanistan — Their
campaign workers traded blows over ballot boxes during an election widely seen
as fraudulent. Some of the warlords backing them have muttered about starting a
parallel government, a potential recipe for civil war in Afghanistan. And
they’ve just come out of a vote so discredited that some officials don’t want
the final tallies announced.
Now Ashraf Ghani, Afghanistan’s
new president-elect, and his opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, have joined together
in a national unity government in which they will share power.
After eight months of enmity
over the protracted presidential election, with two rounds of voting, an
international audit and power-sharing negotiations finally behind them, they
will have to confront the challenges of jointly governing a country that in
many ways is far worse off than it was before the campaign began last February.
The Taliban have had one of
their most successful fighting seasons since the beginning of the war, and the
security forces are reeling from heavy casualties, a high desertion rate and
poor morale. The Afghan economy is battered by election uncertainty and rising
unemployment, and in desperate need of emergency financing from the United
States and other donors.
But both Mr. Ghani and Mr.
Abdullah are expected to bring a welcome change from the confrontational
relationship between the incumbent, President Hamid Karzai, and his American
allies. Their relationship with the Americans will be one of the points of
concord in what could well turn into a discordant and possibly unstable
government.
In an interview with The New
York Times last month, Mr. Ghani cited a parable to describe the problem
confronting them. “Two people are riding in a boat and one of them took a
chisel and started making a hole in the bottom and the other one said, ‘What
are you doing? You’re going to drown us.’ And the other said, ‘I’m making the
hole in my part of the boat.’ ”
“That captures it,” he said.
“There are not two boats.”
The agreement forming the new
government, brokered by Secretary of State John Kerry, who led an intense
diplomatic effort over the past month, makes Mr. Abdullah or his nominee the
chief executive of the government, with the sort of powers a prime minister
normally has. While reporting to the president, the chief executive will handle
the daily running of the government. At the same time, Mr. Ghani keeps all the
powers granted to the president by the Afghan Constitution.
Already, supporters for each
side have debated whether Mr. Ghani will have more power, or whether Mr.
Abdullah will be an equal partner.
That does not bode well.
Neither did the brief ceremony Sunday afternoon during which the two men signed
the power-sharing agreement in front of President Karzai and their top
supporters.
They hugged one another stiffly
afterward, to decidedly tepid applause, and the entire event lasted less than a
quarter-hour. They failed to show up for a planned joint news conference on
Sunday, sending spokesmen instead.
While Mr. Ghani and Mr.
Abdullah have known one another for many years, having served together in
various positions in Afghan governments under Mr. Karzai, they have long had
relations widely described as strained.
“They have created a fabricated
national unity government, and I don’t think such a government can last,” said
Wadir Safi, a political analyst at Kabul University.
At the same time, a national unity
government is not a completely alien idea here. Mr. Karzai adroitly brought
leaders from diverse ethnic and political groups into his government, and the
security ministries especially — defense, interior and intelligence — were
usually headed by northern Tajiks rather than Mr. Karzai’s fellow Pashtuns.
The two new leaders have plenty
of common ground as well. Both are generally pro-American in their views; Mr.
Ghani lived and worked there for many years, and Mr. Abdullah was a frequent
visitor, and a close ally when the United States invaded Afghanistan alongside
his Northern Alliance.
They both say they plan to sign
the bilateral security agreement with the United States the moment they take
office. Delayed a year because Mr. Karzai refused to sign it, the agreement is
necessary if American troops are to remain in Afghanistan after the end of the
current combat mission this year.
With 30,000 Americans and
17,000 other coalition troops still here, planning a sudden withdrawal by the
end of the year would have been a challenge, but neither leader wants to
renegotiate the agreement. Only a handful of Afghan military and police units are
rated as completely self-sufficient without coalition support, which would
potentially make a total pullout a disaster that neither leader wants.
There are strong indications,
too, that the Taliban have taken advantage of the power vacuum caused by the
long election imbroglio to step up their campaign, carrying out 700 ground
offensives in the first six months of the current Afghan year, which began
March 21, and killing 1,368 policemen and 800 soldiers, more than in any
similar period.
Both Mr. Ghani and Mr. Abdullah
have similar views on fighting the Taliban, agreeing that the country needs the
sort of wartime commander in chief it has not had under Mr. Karzai, who has
long seemed as if he simply wanted to wish the war away.
American diplomats who worked
closely with both men in recent months, setting up and attending many meetings
between the two, say their understanding of one another has grown greatly, and
differences have increasingly been greater among some of their harder-line
staff members than with each other.
A European official and a
former Afghan official said that powerful backers of each candidate appeared to
be making no moves to stand down the militias they control, preferring to see
what happens in the coming months before sending home the gunmen they had
raised over the summer.
“We’ve seen no moves in the
north or outside Kabul or in eastern areas where these illegal armies are
concentrated,” said the European official, who spoke on condition of anonymity
because he did not want to further inflame tensions in Afghanistan.
“There are going to be lots of
centers of power in the government. Who will dominate? Abdullah’s people are
worried that he’s going to be relegated to being nothing more than a senior
adviser, and they’ll all be shoved aside by Ghani’s supporters, who want to be
able to protect their claims on power and businesses,” the European official
said.
In addition to wartime
concerns, their government will have to tackle an economy in deep crisis. The
election impasse chased away investment, slowed economic activity and worsened
an already growing unemployment problem as the military has been greatly
reducing its presence.
By midyear, the Ministry of
Finance was reporting net income of less than zero, as the cost of collecting
taxes and customs duties exceeded the revenue raised. Afghanistan seemed
unlikely to meet even its projected revenue goal of $2 billion this year, which
already was $5 billion short of its needs, according to American officials.
This month, teachers and other public workers were facing a payless payday,
while the government asked donors for $537 million in emergency funding so it
could meet its payrolls.
Less quantifiable would be the
damage to the reputations of Afghanistan and its supporters in creating a
viable democracy — although that, too, could have a price, since donor
countries have made a free and fair election and a democratic, peaceful
transfer of power the basis for continued aid. In Tokyo last year, for
instance, donor nations made satisfactory elections a precondition for $16
billion in development assistance.
Despite as much as a
half-billion dollars in international support for the elections and the audit
(even the lowest estimates exceed $200 million), in the end the two candidates
cut a political deal before the vote totals were even announced.
At the last minute, Mr.
Abdullah had threatened to boycott the deal altogether unless the Independent
Election Commission did not release the vote totals, and that is what happened
Sunday. The commission merely announced that Mr. Ghani was the winner, without
citing any numbers.
The European Union’s observer
mission, which had more than 410 people here, called the United
Nations-supervised audit “unsatisfactory” and expressed “regrets that no precise
results figures have been published.”
“Many people risked their lives
to vote, some lost their lives and this is a very bad precedent,” said Nader
Nadery, the head of the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan, a
respected Afghan monitoring group. “To persuade people to come back and vote
again will be very hard.”
Mr. Nadery, whose organization
monitored the vote, said it had estimated that the final total would be about
54 percent to 45 percent in favor of Mr. Ghani, even after fraudulent votes
were discounted. He said there was clearly large-scale fraud on both sides.
American officials were eager
to portray Sunday’s outcome as an important milestone, and proof that the
country could weather its first change of power peacefully and democratically.
It was emblematic of the
confused ending to the election ordeal that no one was even sure when
President-elect Ghani would be inaugurated. Under the deal, he is obliged to
appoint Mr. Abdullah as chief executive at that inauguration, so they will both
be in the same boat immediately.
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