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Kerry, in Afghanistan, Seeks Deal to Ease Vote Crisis
Afghanistan to Audit Every Vote Cast, Kerry Says
(about 3 hours later)
KABUL, Afghanistan — Secretary of State John Kerry spent a second day here in the Afghan capital on Saturday shuttling between the top two presidential contenders and the presidential palace in an effort to forge an agreement on how to audit recent elections and prevent Afghanistan’s first democratic transfer of power from collapsing.
KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghanistan will conduct an audit of the entire eight million votes cast in a runoff vote for the recent presidential election, Secretary of State John Kerry announced on Saturday, a deal he brokered to resolve a tense power struggle between the top two presidential candidates over widespread vote fraud.
The two candidates, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah and former Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani, spent the day inside the United States Embassy building holding separate meetings with Mr. Kerry, according to campaign officials. Mr. Kerry then traveled to the palace to talk to President Hamid Karzai. Talks were continuing into early evening without food or drink because of Ramadan, for which Muslims fast during the day. Mr. Kerry complained, jokingly, to Mr. Karzai that his embassy had “starved” him, according to pool reports.
The audit will be the largest and most comprehensive possible, Mr. Kerry said at a news conference in Kabul. “Every single ballot that was cast will be audited,” he said. “All eight million of them.”
Both candidates say that the election was marred by fraud, but both have also claimed victory.
Discussions concerned how to determine how many ballots should be re-examined for fraud and how to ensure that the audit was impartial.
By midday, Mahmoud Saikal, an adviser to Mr. Abdullah, said that “preliminary progress” had been made and that the campaign was waiting to see if the proposals would be accepted by the other side. He said he was hopeful that there would be a breakthrough by the end of the day. But a spokesman for Mr. Ghani, Abdullah Poyan, said the discussions remained “complicated.”
Mr. Kerry is seeking not only agreement between the two candidates, but also acceptance by Mr. Karzai, who will step down after 13 years in power and has by all accounts remained a powerful presence behind the scenes.
In the first round, Mr. Abdullah emerged the winner against 11 other candidates, with 45 percent of the vote to Mr. Ghani’s 31 percent. Because neither won more than 50 percent of the vote, a runoff between the two was required. Preliminary results from the runoff show Mr. Ghani leaping ahead with 56 percent of the vote, and Mr. Abdullah with 44 percent. The turnout also increased by more than a million voters in the runoff, to eight million.
Mr. Abdullah’s campaign has accused his opponents of conducting extensive institutional fraud, and has alleged that members of the Independent Election Commission, government officials and Ghani supporters orchestrated large-scale ballot stuffing to enable Mr. Ghani to win the presidency.
Mr. Ghani’s team has said fraud took place on both sides and insists that his better showing in the runoff was the result of an energetic campaign to mobilize his fellow ethnic Pashtuns to vote for him. Both sides have formally agreed to an audit to weed out fraudulent votes, but have wrangled over the technical details, in particular the threshold for selecting which ballots should be reviewed, as well as how to ensure independence or outside supervision of the process.
The dispute, which has delayed results for nearly a month since the initial June 14 vote, comes amid a rise in violence around the country. Civilians are killed and wounded more frequently now in Afghanistan than at any point since the arrival of American forces, the International Crisis Group said in a statement on Saturday.
Seven members of the Afghan security forces were killed in clashes with the Taliban east of the capital in Laghman Province on Saturday. Two tribal elders were killed in separate attacks in southern Afghanistan, electricity has been knocked out in the city of Kandahar, and a bomb killed two people in Jalalabad.
Mr. Kerry has arrived on a mission much like one he undertook five years ago for the 2009 presidential election, trying to rescue a vote marred by huge fraud and resolve differences between two candidates who were both claiming victory. At that time, Mr. Karzai was campaigning against Mr. Abdullah for a second term.
Mr. Kerry’s task may be even harder this time, since history has if anything hardened the opposing sides. Mr. Abdullah believes that he was robbed of victory in 2009, and Mr. Karzai has since overseen changes meant to reduce the international involvement in the election process. The discussions taking place this weekend also cover an agreement in which the victor would form a national unity government to include representatives of all ethnic and regional groups.
At stake is the future of democracy in Afghanistan, and a power struggle that could once again plunge the country into ethnic violence. Some officials here warn that such an outcome could be even more dangerous for the country than the continuing Taliban insurgency.
“The legitimacy of this voting process is obviously at stake,” said a senior administration official traveling with Mr. Kerry in a briefing to journalists Friday evening. He was speaking on the condition that he not be named in accordance with State Department rules.
“There were millions of people that voted in the first round and then again in the second round of elections,” he said. “They deserve to be counted accurately and to demonstrate that democracy works.”
