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MONITORING (SW) – Presidential candidate, Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah has said in an interview with The New York Times that President Ashraf Ghani is a challenge for the country, not for him.
“The point is how to replace him through circumstances in which the country is not lost”, Abdullah has been quoted as saying by the NYT. In its report, the newspaper said that three months after Afghanistan’s presidential vote, the entire electoral process is stalled in a dispute that Afghan and Western officials say could pose an even greater threat to stability than the last such crisis, five years ago.
Supporters of opposition candidates have besieged half a dozen election offices around the country for weeks, vowing to fight rather than accept another U.S.-brokered compromise like the one that resolved the 2014 dispute. Security officials worry that one wrong move could tip the protests into bloodshed. And election officials say a biometric verification process that was supposed to prevent voter fraud may have been compromised by human error, it said.
As per the NYT, in the middle of it all — again — is Abdullah Abdullah, making his third attempt to become president, and for the third time falling into a bitter standoff with election officials. This one is likely to play out differently. With American diplomacy focused on negotiating an end to the long war with the Taliban, Western officials say the United States has made it clear that it will not be stepping in like it did five years ago. Then, Secretary of State John Kerry negotiated a power-sharing deal between Mr. Abdullah, now Afghanistan’s chief executive, and Ashraf Ghani, now the president, that Mr. Kerry said had averted a civil war.
As per the report, since Mr. Abdullah and his supporters forced the American intervention in 2014, he has tried to project an image of unity, playing his part in a “power sharing” government in which Mr. Ghani, in reality, has kept a lock on the power. But Mr. Abdullah’s supporters are warier of him this time, though they say they are firm in rejecting what they see as fraud perpetrated to keep Mr. Ghani in office.
It added, even as Mr. Abdullah insists he will not give in, the strongmen who have rallied around him are worried, according to interviews with advisers and political brokers. In private, they have repeatedly raised their concern about Mr. Abdullah, often to his face: Will the man who has challenged two previous votes before compromising stick to the fight this time, or will he again strike a deal for his own political survival?
“One’s own survival as a politician, if that is the aim of somebody — he is misleading and he is misled,” Mr. Abdullah said during an interview with The New York Times, acknowledging his allies’ concerns and saying he was determined to fight.
“If he wins fairly, I have the courage to congratulate him. Don’t worry about my friends — I will go to each and every one of them. I am not here to create problems for the country,” Mr. Abdullah said. “But what I am talking about is not winning based on votes — that’s not acceptable.”
ENDS
