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Afghan Candidate Abdullah Withdraws From Audit of Presidential Vote Afghan Unity Government Effort in Doubt as Candidate Boycotts Election Audit
(about 4 hours later)
KABUL, Afghanistan — One of the two presidential candidates in Afghanistan’s hotly disputed election pulled out of an internationally supervised audit of the results on Wednesday. KABUL, Afghanistan — American and United Nations officials scrambled to salvage Afghanistan’s bitterly contested presidential election on Wednesday, after one candidate, Abdullah Abdullah, decided to boycott the internationally brokered audit of the vote.
Aides to Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister, walked out of the Independent Election Commission’s headquarters here after a series of technical demands about the audit, made by his campaign aides on Tuesday, went unmet. American diplomats met with Mr. Abdullah in an effort to persuade him to continue negotiations aimed at forming a national unity government, according to aides to Mr. Abdullah.
United Nations officials supervising the process then asked Mr. Abdullah’s opponent, Ashraf Ghani, to also withdraw from the audit so it could continue with only international and independent observers present, giving neither campaign an unfair advantage. Daud Sultanzoy, head of the Ghani campaign’s audit team, said its observers would accede to the request. Meanwhile, the United Nations announced that it would continue the audit, the most exhaustive ever supervised by the world body, without the presence of observers for either of the two candidates.
It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Abdullah would accept the eventual results of the audit, which United Nations officials have described as the most exhaustive the world body has ever undertaken. Mr. Abdullah demanded it after finishing as runner-up in the June 14 runoff, which he said had been marred by fraud. After Mr. Abdullah’s team pulled out of an observer role in the audit, United Nations officials asked observers for his opponent, Ashraf Ghani, to also pull out, too, in order to maintain an appearance of impartiality in the process. The Ghani campaign agreed, and after a pause Wednesday morning, the ballot review resumed in the afternoon.
Both Mr. Abdullah and Mr. Ghani pledged to Secretary of State John Kerry that they would accept the audit’s conclusions about who had won the election and then would form a government of national unity including officials from both campaigns. Examination of the ballots and decisions on whether to invalidate them would be conducted by the Independent Election Commission, with independent observers overseen by the United Nations, according to the deputy head of the United Nations mission here, Nicholas Haysom.
But it was unclear Wednesday whether Mr. Abdullah planned to keep that commitment. He had yet to make a public comment on the matter, but statements from his aides have been negative. On Tuesday, his chief auditor, Fazul Ahmad Manawi, said that if the campaign’s demands for changes to the audit were not met, Mr. Abdullah would pull out of both the audit and the broader election process. “We will not continue to be part of the process, and any result coming out of it will not be acceptable to us and will have no credibility to us,” he said. Mr. Haysom said the United Nations was still considering objections made to the audit process by Mr. Abdullah’s side, but said it was not possible to comply with his ultimatum demanding immediate changes to the process.
United Nations officials have said that both candidates had agreed to the terms and conditions of the audit but that it was willing to consider changes based on new evidence of fraud that might arise as ballots are reviewed. The officials said they had every intention of continuing with the audit. “Self-evidently, candidates cannot set the rules for their own election, and this was accepted by both of the candidates in their agreement the 12th of July,” Mr. Hayson said, referring to the initial deal brokered with the help of Secretary of State John Kerry to establish the audit and to form a unity government.
Later, Mr. Abdullah met for several hours with the American ambassador, James B. Cunningham, and the United States special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Daniel F. Feldman. Aides to Mr. Abdullah said the Americans dropped efforts to persuade him to return to a role in the audit, and instead concentrated on salvaging talks for a national unity government in which both camps would share power to some degree.
In the evening, Mr. Ghani and Mr. Abdullah were due to meet for face-to-face negotiations on the same subject, according to Muslim Saadat, a spokesman for Mr. Abdullah. Both men also met Tuesday night, he said.
Announcing the candidate’s threatened withdrawal from the audit on Tuesday, his top auditor, Fazul Ahmad Manawi, had said flatly, “We will not continue to be part of the process and any result coming out of it will not be acceptable to us and will have no credibility to us.”
That seemed to indicate Mr. Abdullah was backing out of the agreement Mr. Kerry brokered. But on Wednesday, the Abdullah campaign noticeably dialed back its rhetoric. “Until now Reform and Partnership has not decided to reject the agreement,” Mr. Saadat said, referring to the name of Mr. Abdullah’s campaign coalition. “But we will not attend the audit process any more since our demands are not met.”
That still left open the possibility that Mr. Abdullah would accept the audit result, provided that the two candidates could make a political deal.
Mr. Saadat said the candidate was willing to continue discussions on a national unity government, in which he and his followers would be guaranteed senior positions, including the post of “chief executive” for the government. Defining the powers of that post has been the main sticking point between the two candidates, who have otherwise agreed on most issues, according to a senior American official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity of the discussions.
The American official said that some supporters were less willing to make difficult compromises than the two candidates themselves, and said it was a positive sign that Mr. Abdullah and Mr. Ghani were meeting face to face in a cooperative manner.
“It’s entirely understandable that it would be difficult for groups of people who fought a very long, hard and at times nasty campaign and now they’re being asked to transition to cooperating together in a new government,” the American official said. “But the two of them have made that transition, the people around them have or are starting to.”
The audit process was repeatedly interrupted by disputes between observers on both sides, which on at least four occasions devolved into violent altercations.
According to Ahmad Qais Ameri, a Ghani campaign official, one of their observers who accused an Abdullah observer of improperly having two election ID cards on Tuesday was later chased down and stabbed by unknown assailants on Wednesday.
Some international observers expect that, while many votes are being invalidated in the audit, the invalidations will take place on both sides and will not substantially change the result, leaving Mr. Ghani the winner.
The Abdullah campaign alleges, however, that there were millions of fraudulent ballots rigged on Mr. Ghani’s behalf, and its walkout took place after its auditors expressed anger at the slow pace of invalidations, which formally began on Monday.