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Tag: ashraf ghani
Afghanistan And U.S. Sign Long-Delayed Troop Pact

Afghanistan And U.S. Sign Long-Delayed Troop Pact

Kabul (AFP) – Afghanistan and the United States on Tuesday signed a deal to allow about 10,000 U.S. troops to stay in the country next year, as new President Ashraf Ghani took a major step towards mending frayed ties with Washington.

Hamid Karzai, who stepped down as president on Monday, had refused to sign the deal — a disagreement that symbolized the breakdown of Afghan-U.S. relations after the optimism of 2001 when the Taliban were ousted from power.

Afghan National Security Adviser Hanif Atmar and U.S. Ambassador James Cunningham inked the bilateral security agreement (BSA) at a ceremony in the presidential palace in Kabul as Ghani looked on.

“We have signed an agreement which is for the good of our people, the stability of the region and the world,” Ghani said, adding it would allow continued U.S. funding for the 350,000-strong Afghan security forces.

“Threats exist to our joint interests, and this gives us a common goal,” Ghani said after fulfilling his campaign vow to have the deal signed on his first full day in office.

Many long-term international aid pledges were dependent on the BSA being signed to strengthen security.

Taliban insurgents still pose a major risk despite years of effort by NATO’s US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

NATO combat operations will finish at the end of this year, and the Taliban have launched a series of recent offensives that have severely tested Afghan soldiers and police.

NATO’s follow-up mission, which will take over on January 1, will be made up of 9,800 U.S. troops and about 3,000 soldiers from Germany, Italy and other member nations.

The new mission — named Resolute Support — will focus on training and assisting Afghan forces as they take on the Taliban, in parallel with U.S. counter-terrorism operations.

“Afghan security forces have demonstrated their resolve and capability,” U.S. Ambassador James Cunningham said.

“This agreement will enable the United States to help (them) to build on this progress after the ISAF mission comes to a close.”

Cunningham said the deal would also open the way for further support in health, education and women’s issues in Afghanistan, which faces a growing economic crisis.

Negotiations over the pact saw Karzai, who came to power in 2001, at his most unpredictable as he added new demands and shifted positions, infuriating the U.S.

He eventually refused to sign the agreement last year despite a “loya jirga” grand assembly which he had convened voting for him to do so. There was also widespread public support for U.S. troops to stay.

On the election campaign trail, both Ghani and his poll rival Abdullah Abdullah vowed to reverse Karzai’s decision.

Without a deal, Washington had threatened to pull all U.S. forces out by the end of the year, but it chose to wait through a long election deadlock until Afghanistan finally got a new president on Monday.

After month of disputes over fraud, Ghani agreed to a power-sharing deal with Abdullah, who has taken up the new role of chief executive.

NATO support next year is seen as essential for national stability — though the limited size of the mission and the fact that it will be scaled back during 2015 will restrict its capabilities.

U.S. President Barack Obama has previously announced that the U.S. force will be halved by the end of next year, before being reduced to a normal embassy protection presence by the end of 2016.

The failure to sign a similar deal with Iraq in 2011 led to a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country, which is now engulfed in Islamist violence.

The Taliban described the signing of the BSA as “embarrassing and regrettable”.

“We tell America and its slaves that we will continue our holy jihad until our country is liberated from the claws of savage Americans,” the group said in a emailed statement.

The security threat in Kabul was underlined on Monday by a suicide attack outside the airport’s main entrance that killed four members of the Afghan security forces and three civilians.

The inauguration marked the country’s first democratic transfer of power, although the UN said the election was beset by “significant fraud”.

AFP Photo/Wakil Kohsar

Kerry Tries To Calm Afghan Presidential Candidates

Kerry Tries To Calm Afghan Presidential Candidates

By Shashank Bengali and Hashmat Baktash, Los Angeles Times

KABUL, Afghanistan — Secretary of State John F. Kerry held urgent meetings Friday with both presidential candidates in Afghanistan in a bid to resolve a messy election dispute that threatens to unravel years of U.S. efforts to build a fledgling democracy.

Kerry met separately with Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah in Kabul in a hastily arranged visit that underscored the Obama administration’s concerns that the political impasse could turn violent. Both men have claimed victory in the election to replace President Hamid Karzai, who is constitutionally barred from a third term.

The crisis escalated Monday when election officials announced initial results from a June 14 run-off vote that gave a large and surprising lead to Ghani, a former finance minister, after he finished well behind Abdullah in the first round of balloting in April. Abdullah has alleged widespread fraud and accused election officials of conspiring with Ghani’s campaign and Karzai’s office to rig the results.

Both men believe they have won the race and are haggling over the terms of a partial recount of ballots over the next two weeks.

“The results that were announced on Monday are preliminary; they are neither authoritative nor final, and no one should be stating a victory at this point in time,” Kerry said before meeting with Abdullah.

The U.N. mission in Afghanistan announced a proposal for an expanded audit of votes that would include thousands of ballot boxes where Western officials believe the chances for fraud and ballot-box stuffing were high. They include ballot boxes that were returned with more than 595 ballots, female-only ballot boxes that were staffed by male election workers, certain voting sites where votes from women exceeded those from men, and ballot boxes where the votes received by either candidate totaled a multiple of 50, starting with 100.

Under those terms, some 8,050 ballot boxes would be audited, or more than one-third of the total. The U.N. said that represents 3.5 million votes, far above the 1 million-vote margin Ghani holds in the initial results, and more than enough to swing the election in either direction.

Ghani’s campaign had reportedly acceded to the U.N. proposal in meetings Thursday, but Abdullah’s camp was believed to be holding out for an even wider audit of up to 11,000 ballot boxes.

Abdullah did not comment publicly on the U.N. plan but said in brief remarks before meeting Kerry that he hoped “all of us will utilize the precious time of your presence here in the best interests of our country.”

Ghani, who has told supporters he is confident of victory, said he favored “the most intensive and extensive audit possible.”

“Our commitment is to ensure that the election process enjoys the integrity and the legitimacy that the people of Afghanistan and the world will believe,” Ghani said.

Los Angeles Times staff writer Bengali reported from Mumbai, India, and special correspondent Baktash from Kabul.

AFP Photo / Jim Bourg

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Runoff Looks Likely In Afghanistan Presidential Election

Runoff Looks Likely In Afghanistan Presidential Election

By Hashmat Baktash and Shashank Bengali, Los Angeles Times

KABUL, Afghanistan — Early tallies released Sunday suggested that Afghanistan’s presidential election will be a two-man race, with neither former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah nor former World Bank economist Ashraf Ghani close to the majority needed to avoid a runoff.

Abdullah held a slight edge, with 41.9 percent of the vote to Ghani’s 37.6 percent. The partial results represented barely 7 percent of the estimated 7 million ballots cast, however, and international observers urged patience during lengthy vote counting.

TThe initial results were the first official figures released from the April 5 election, which would lead to the first democratic transfer of power in Afghanistan’s history. President Hamid Karzai is constitutionally barred from seeking a third term.

Full preliminary results are expected to be announced in two weeks. If no one wins a majority, a runoff election between the top two vote-getters would be held in late May or June.

Running a distant third was longtime Karzai adviser Zalmai Rassoul, whom many had viewed as the incumbent’s favored candidate. Rassoul had 9.8 percent of the vote. Though that trend, if it holds up, would put him out of the race, in a close second-round contest his endorsement could prove important.

So could that of Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, an Islamist former warlord best known for once having ties to Osama bin Laden. Sayyaf had 5.1 percent of the vote, according to the figures released by Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission.

“Until the final results are announced by the IEC, stakeholders should be careful in drawing premature conclusions so as not to create inaccurate expectations,” said Jan Kubis, the top United Nations official in Kabul. “I urge presidential candidates and their supporters to display patience while vote tallying is completed.”

Because of a high turnout and the lack of a large-scale attack by Taliban insurgents that could have derailed balloting, the election was a milestone in Afghanistan. However, there were reports of scattered violence across the country on Election Day, as well as of many Afghans choosing not to vote because of Taliban threats.

Election officials said that 205 polling centers of the 6,423 nationwide did not open for security reasons, although they did not say where. In past Afghan elections, a prime source of fraud was stuffed ballot boxes from polling sites that were not open to voters.

“Now that they’re starting to release the results, I hope they’ll also soon post the list of closed polling stations, so that this can be compared to people’s observations,” said Martine van Bijlert, co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, an independent research organization in Kabul.

The early results showed that Abdullah, who has close ties to the anti-Soviet Northern Alliance factions that retain influence among Afghanistan’s ethnic minorities, performed well in northern Afghanistan, as expected.

Ghani, who, like Karzai, is a Pashtun, Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group, outpolled his rivals in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, which are dominated by Pashtuns.

The election commission did not release any results from eight of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, including some remote areas where transporting ballots was difficult. But officials said that 85 percent of tally sheets nationwide had arrived at the heavily fortified election headquarters in Kabul, where they were being processed, and the rest were expected to arrive within days.

AFP Photo/Massoud Hossaini