KABUL, Afghanistan – Afghanistan’s two rival candidates reached a breakthrough agreement Saturday to a complete audit of their contested presidential election and, whoever the victor, a national unity government.
The deal, brokered by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, offers a path out of what threatened to be a debilitating political crisis for Afghanistan, with both candidates claiming victory and talking of setting up competing governments.
Such a scenario could have dangerously split the fragile country’s government and security forces at a time the U.S. is pulling out most of its troops, and the Taliban continues to wage a fierce insurgency.
Instead, former Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani and former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah agreed to abide by a 100 percent, internationally supervised audit of all 8 million ballots in the presidential election. They vowed to form a national unity government once the results are announced, presumably one that includes members of each side.
Kerry, who conducted shuttle diplomacy between the two candidates late into the night Friday and Saturday, warned much work still remained.
“This will be still a difficult road because there are important obligations required and difficult decisions to be made,” he told reporters after briefing Afghanistan’s current president, Hamid Karzai, shortly after midnight.
The audit, which comes after widespread fraud allegations, is expected to take several weeks, beginning with the ballot boxes in the capital of Kabul.
Boxes from the provinces will be flown to the capital by helicopter by U.S. and international forces and examined on a rolling basis. Representatives from each campaign as well as international observers will oversee the review, and the candidate with the most votes will be declared the winner and become president.
Both candidates agreed to respect the result, and the winner would immediately form a national unity government. The inauguration, which had been scheduled for Aug. 2, would be postponed, with Karzai staying on a little longer as president.
Abdullah said the election created “serious challenges.” But he praised Ghani for working toward the accord on the audit and the unity government.
Ghani returned the compliments, lauding his competitor’s patriotism and commitment to a dialogue that promotes national unity.
“Stability is the desire of everyone,” he said. “Our aim is simple: We’ve committed to the most thorough audit” in history. Such a process would remove any ambiguity about the result, he added.
Preliminary runoff results, released earlier this week against U.S. wishes, suggested a massive turnaround in favor of Ghani, the onetime World Bank economist. He had lagged significantly behind Abdullah in first-round voting.
Abdullah, a top leader of the Northern Alliance that battled the Taliban before the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, claimed massive ballot-stuffing. He was runner-up to Karzai in a fraud-riddled 2009 presidential vote before he pulled out of that runoff, and many of his supporters see him being cheated for a second time. Some, powerful warlords included, have spoken of establishing a “parallel government.”
Both Ghani and Abdullah have vowed to seal a bilateral security pact with the U.S. that Karzai has refused to sign.
