[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.]
By Rod Nordland
 |
|
Abdullah Abdullah, center left, and Ashraf Ghani embraced
during a brief ceremony
on Sunday during which the two men signed a
power-sharing agreement.
Credit Jawad Jalali/European Press photo Agency
|
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.
Matthew
Rosenberg contributed reporting from Washington
