Afghans went to the polls in February and June to elect a successor to President Hamid Karzai. The result was a standoff between two rivals for the post that brought the central government to a screeching halt and raised the specter of ethnic warlords feuding for spoils.
Now we have a winner: Ashraf Ghani, the former finance minister, who was named president-elect Sunday by the country’s election commission. Ghani signed a power-sharing agreement with the runner-up, Abdullah Abdullah, who had bitterly contested Ghani’s victory in the June run-off. The two men hugged briefly at a somewhat frosty ceremony that appeared to raise as many questions as it answered.
For months, Afghan voters have waited to find out what was the truth behind Abdullah’s allegations of systematic election fraud. Had millions of ballots been stuffed or falsified? Would a UN-run audit ferret out the reality and settle the claims so that the nation can move on?
Not exactly, according to a report by The Christian Science Monitor. The election commission ducked the question of how many votes it had invalidated and what it meant for the final tally. Instead, commission chief Ahmad Yousuf Nuristani simply declared the winner without providing the final vote count, while saying the numbers would be released later.
Even the winner seemed put out by this secrecy. Halim Fadai, an official in the Ghani campaign involved in the audit, complained to The New York Times that the UN had caved to pressure from Abdullah’s team not to publicize the results.
US Secretary of State John Kerry has been personally invested in trying to get the two sides to settle and move on. His visit in July yielded a power-sharing deal under which Abdullah, as the runner-up, would get to nominate a prime minister (aka chief executive) with his own council of ministers.
Essentially, there will be two power centers in the executive branch of government. Given the bad blood between the two camps, it will be a test of their political skills to keep it on track. And the result could be an even more bloated executive that costs more to run.
As the Christian Science Monitor’s Dan Murphy wrote in July, the proposed dilution of presidential powers marked a major departure from the governing formula under Karzai. A weak parliament was no match for the imperial president, which concentrated power in the hands of Karzai and his inner circle.
The only external check on Karzai’s powers, Murphy writes, was Afghanistan’s reliance on foreign aid, primarily US, as well as the military muscle of Nato.
Yet this leverage wasn’t enough to convince Karzai to sign a bilateral services agreement in order for thousands of Nato troops to remain after the end of 2014. Now it falls to president-elect Ghani, who is expected to be sworn in next week, to sign on the dotted line.