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Kerry to Discuss Election Controversy During Afghanistan Visit

by VOA News August 07, 2014

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Afghanistan on an unannounced visit late Thursday to meet with rival presidential candidates locked in a hard-fought dispute over election results.

Kerry will push for a resolution between former Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani and challenger Abdullah Abdullah.

According to preliminary results, former World Bank economist Ghani easily won the run-off vote. But Abdullah, a former anti-Taliban resistance fighter, alleged massive ballot-box stuffing and refused to accept the result, with his supporters urging him to set up a 'parallel government.'

It is Kerry's second visit to Afghanistan in less than a month. In July, he negotiated a deal in which Ghani and Abdullah agreed to an audit of all 8 million votes from the June 14 run-off election.

Unity government

Also under the deal, agreed upon verbally, the winning candidate will take the role of president and form a government of national unity, while the loser will assume the position of chief executive.

The structure of that government, however, still needs to be hammered out and the two candidates have widely divergent views on how it should function.

Kerry plans to meet with the candidates on Thursday, as well as with Jan Kubis, the U.N. Special Representative for Afghanistan.

On Friday, before heading to Myanmar for an Asian security conference, Kerry is to meet with Afghan President Hamid Karzai to hammer out a schedule for the election winner to be finally declared.

Kerry's visit was 'to encourage both candidates to accelerate the audit process. We really want to see it moving faster,' a U.S. official said.

'We're hopeful that the Secretary can obtain a commitment by both candidates to a timeline for completing the audit and agreeing on the details of a national unity government,' the official added.

Although a painstaking audit of all 8 million ballots cast in the second round of voting is under way, neither candidate has openly endorsed the process and the deadlock has raised the specter of violent conflict along ethnic lines.

NATO meeting

The clock is now ticking for a new president to be in office before the end of this month ahead of a NATO summit on Sept. 4-5. NATO desperately wants Afghanistan to have a leader at the summit that was to be a crowning moment of its mission of more than a decade, and before Western combat troops withdraw at the end of 2014.

While Karzai has said the next president will be inaugurated on August 25, most officials involved in the process say the deadline is optimistic and it could take until the end of the month for a winner to emerge at the earliest.

"We are hopeful the secretary can obtain a commitment by both candidates to a timeline for completing the audit and agreeing on the details of a national unity government," said a senior State Department official who briefed reporters en route to Kabul.

Kerry's visit comes two days after the shooting death of Maj. Gen. Harold Greene during a so-called insider attack by an Afghan soldier at a military training facility near Kabul.

Ayaz Gul contributed to this report from Islamabad. Some information for this report provided by Reuters and AFP.