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Ashraf Ghani Is Named President of Afghanistan by Elections Panel After Rancor, Afghans Agree to Share Power
(about 11 hours later)
KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghanistan’s election commission on Sunday pronounced Ashraf Ghani the winner of the country’s presidential election, but it withheld an announcement of the total votes won, despite an exhaustive and costly audit process overseen by the United Nations and financed by the American government. 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 have just come out of a vote so discredited that some officials do not want the final tallies announced.
The suppression of the vote totals was apparently the final step necessary for the two presidential candidates to sign an American-brokered agreement to form a power-sharing government, giving the runner-up, Abdullah Abdullah, substantial powers in what is, in effect, the post of prime minister. The two men signed that deal even before Mr. Ghani was formally declared the winner by the Independent Election Commission later in the day. 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.
On Saturday, Mr. Abdullah’s aides said he would refuse to agree to the deal unless the vote totals were kept secret, since he regards the election as heavily tainted by fraud. 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.
Critics of the election commission claimed that it had been pressured by the international community not to announce the results to get Mr. Abdullah back on board with the agreement. 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.
Democracy advocates were aghast at the whole process, although American diplomats hailed it as Afghanistan’s first peaceful, democratic transfer of power. 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.
“Many people risked their lives to vote, some lost their lives, and this is a very bad precedent; to persuade people to come back and vote again will be very hard,” said Nader Nadery, chairman of the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan. 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.’ ”
But an American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that the result “absolutely” could be called democratic and that “the process was in accordance to the electoral law.” “That captures it,” he said. “There are not two boats.”
Halim Fadai, who was in charge of the observer team for the winning candidate, Mr. Ghani, denounced the commission’s suppression of the vote totals. “The international community gives out democracy slogans while putting nails in the coffin of democracy of Afghanistan,” Mr. Fadai said. 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.
The two candidates met at the Presidential Palace with President Hamid Karzai and their supporters, quickly signed their two copies of the four-page agreement and then briefly hugged each other, to tepid applause from the audience. Already, supporters for each side have debated whether Mr. Ghani will have more power, or whether Mr. Abdullah will be an equal partner.
In a brief speech, Mr. Karzai thanked them, and then the event was over in 10 minutes — in sharp contrast to the protracted election process that began in February, ran through two elections and involved a long and controversial audit, which the United Nations called the most exhaustive it had ever overseen. 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.
The candidates’ signatures on the deal forming a power-sharing government came five hours before the election commission announced the winner. While the commission chairman, Mohammad Yousef Nuristani, announced that the votes of 1,260 polling stations out of 23,000 were invalidated, he did not give the total vote count, nor did he say how many votes were judged valid for each candidate. Mr. Nuristani simply declared Mr. Ghani the winner, and left the news conference without taking questions as an outraged crowd of mostly Afghan journalists shouted at him. 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.
Mr. Fadai said officials from the Independent Election Commission had told him that Jan Kubis, who heads of the United Nations mission here, pressured them not to announce the actual results until a week had gone by. 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.
“He argued that the opposing team are armed and they will create a crisis,” he said. “This is very unfortunate. I think the United Nations, instead of supporting democracy, has bowed down to the pressure of the warlords.” “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.
A spokesman for Mr. Kubis could not be reached for a response to Mr. Fadai’s claims. 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.
In a Twitter post, Mr. Fadai published what he said was the commission’s final tally sheet, showing that the vote total was 3.9 million (55.3 percent) for Mr. Ghani and 3.1 million (44.7 percent) for Mr. Abdullah, with 7.1 million votes cast. That suggested that a million votes had been ruled invalid by the election commission, since originally it announced that 8.1 million people voted in the June 14 runoff election between Mr. Ghani and Mr. Abdullah. 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.
The commission did not say how many votes it had ruled invalid after what had been billed as a 100 percent audit of the vote. 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.
Mr. Nadery, whose organization also 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. 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.
The agreement provides for Mr. Ghani to appoint Mr. Abdullah, or someone he nominates, to take a new post called the chief executive officer. The post has substantial powers over the cabinet and a new body, called a council of ministers, while not removing the presidential powers outlined in the country’s Constitution. 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.
It also provides for the chief executive officer to have two deputies, who presumably would be Mr. Abdullah’s two running mates for the posts of first and second vice president. 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.
A spokesman for Mr. Abdullah, Fazel Sancharaki, said the candidates expected that the inauguration of the new president would take place next Monday. 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.
American officials praised the outcome as a result of months of intensive diplomatic efforts to broker the deal, detailing 81 meetings between the American ambassador, James Cunningham, and the candidates since the June 14 runoff election as well as 30 phone calls and two visits to Kabul from Secretary of State John Kerry, and six calls from President Obama to Mr. Ghani and Mr. Abdullah. 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.
In addition, Daniel F. Feldman, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Jeff Eggers, the president’s top adviser for Afghanistan and Pakistan, met daily with the candidates over the past few weeks. “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.