DISPATCHES FROM MOON OF ALABAMA, BY "B"
This article is part of an ongoing series of dispatches from Moon of Alabama
But a conflict over the presidential election in Afghanistan now threatens to blow up the whole process.
Some people in Kabul always disliked Trump's plan as they were not included in it:
In a clear sign of internal rift, Afghan government's Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah on Monday criticized official handling of the peace process with the Taliban.
Chairing a meeting of the ministers at his office, Abdullah stressed all political parties and groups should be involved in the proposed negotiation team.
“Peace is not one person's monopoly, one person's wish -- but it is a collective desire, and the people of Afghanistan have the right to take a position regarding the peace process,” Tolo News, a local broadcaster, quoted Abdullah as saying.
Today the Afghan election commission announced the final election results and declared President Ashraf Ghani as winner. Abdullah is, like in 2014, not happy with this and now threatens to install a parallel government:
Afghan presidential election challenger Abdullah Abdullah on Tuesday contested final results that declared incumbent President Ashraf Ghani the winner of a September presidential poll, vowing to form a parallel government.
"Our team, based on clean and biometric votes, is the victor and we declare our victory. The fraudsters are the shame of history and we announce our inclusive government," Abdullah said at a press conference in Kabul.
Earlier on Tuesday, Afghan election officials said final results showed he had won 39.52 percent of last September's vote while Ghani had taken 50.64 percent, above the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid another run-off.
...
The delay left Afghanistan facing a political crisis just as the US seeks a deal with the Taliban that would allow it to withdraw troops in return for various security guarantees and a promise that the militants would hold peace talks with the Afghan government.Abdullah lost to Ghani in 2014 in a divisive election that saw the US intervene to broker an awkward power-sharing deal between the two rivals.
Abdullah (yellow) is the 'Northern Alliance' representative. His voters are mostly Tajik, Uzbeks and Hazara while Pashtun voters are favoring Ghani (red).
Source - AAN - bigger
Less than 20% of the registered voters took part in election on September 28 2019. The whole process and the preliminary results were marred with irregularities. The announcement of final results was shifted again and again. As of February 8 there were still many open questions:
The turnout figure of 2,695,890 that was given after the election day is now down to 1,824,401 voters in the preliminary results. This means the electoral commissions have so far ruled almost 30 per cent of the turnout figure invalid. With this, the turnout figure dropped from 28 to 19 per cent of the registered voters.
The remaining question is whether the [Electoral Complaints Commission's] (ECC) decisions for more special audits (of the 137,630 ‘suspicious’ votes and the 102,012 ‘out of time’ votes) as well as another recount (of 298 polling stations) and another audit plus recount (of more than 300 polling stations) will lead to the invalidation of any of these categories of votes. It is important to watch how these audits and recounts will be carried out as well as how the [Independent Election Commission] (IEC) and the ECC will coordinate with each other and with the electoral campaigns. Finally, given Ghani’s narrow margin over the 50 per cent threshold after the preliminary results, any single ruling could potentially change the outcome of the election, and decide whether there will be a run-off or not.
While the 'final' election results were announced today no explanations were given of how the above problems were solved.
With two persons declaring themselves president of Afghanistan the Trump administration now has a problem.
Alarmed over the situation the U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad rushed to Kabul together withthe head of Pakistan's military spy service ISI. They and the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan went immediately to Abdullah's headquarter.
Threats will be made and many millions of dollars will be offered. But Abdullah will not give in. His voters and followers want to see him fighting. He will most likely demand a run-off election to stall any further process. Ghani will of course oppose that.
One wonders who in the Trump administration dropped the ball on this issue. Who allowed the final election result to be announced today?
TOLOnews @TOLOnews - 16:09 UTC · Feb 18, 2020
Breaking – Abdullah announces the formation of an “inclusive government.”
The whole election drama could and should have been fixed before it happened.
Abdullah may well think of splitting the north, west and the central Hazara region of Afghanistan from the mainly Pashtun south and east. It would be difficult fight but Afghan's norther neighbors as well as Russia and China may well support him. They see the U.S. incompetence in Afghanistan and the negotiations with the Taliban as a danger to their countries.
Posted by b on February 18, 2020 at 19:36 UTC | Permalink
Lying by Bush and Obama over Afghanistan is this era’s Pentagon Papers:
On Monday[December 9th], The Washington Post published a bombshell six-part series exposing the Bush and Obama administrations for knowingly and repeatedly lying to the American public about the war in Afghanistan.
This is nothing short of this generation’s Pentagon Papers, which exposed the terrible lie of Vietnam. But chances are you haven’t heard of the Afghanistan Papers, because impeachment is sucking the oxygen out of every newsroom, network and political website in America.
Have we lost our ability to be outraged over anything or anyone aside from Trump and his reality-show administration?
Here we now have 2,000 pages of previously secret documents containing interviews with more than 600 people, from decorated generals to intelligence officers to senior White House officials to ambassadors to aid workers to NATO allies to 20 Afghan officials, all telling the same story.
This war, 18 years old, the longest in American history, no end in sight, is unwinnable. It always will be. But the people who send our young men and women to die there, to suffer grave physical injuries, to return with PTSD that can’t be successfully treated or to commit suicide — at a record rate of twenty veterans per day — have known it all along. And they have lied and manipulated numbers and have kept using our troops as cannon fodder to be seen as tough on the War on Terror and win second terms in office.
. . .
[General] McNeill said when he became NATO commander in 2007, “There was no NATO campaign plan . . . I tried to get someone to define what winning meant, even before I went over, and nobody could.”
Yet in 2008, Bush increased US troops by 10,000, to a total of 31,000. That same year, Barack Obama ran on getting all US troops out of Afghanistan; in his first year as president, Obama increased troop levels by 30,000. When asked why, Obama’s go-to reply was always to “disrupt, dismantle and eventually defeat al Qaeda.”
But as the SIGAR report makes clear, al Qaeda was long gone, and the Taliban had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.
. . .
This time last year, President Trump announced the withdrawal of nearly half our 14,000 soldiers from Afghanistan. In October, The New York Times reported the drawdown was closer to 2,000.
Clearly, no end is in sight.
!!
Posted by: Jackrabbit | Feb 18 2020 20:04 utc | 2
it's complicated.. thanks b... it seems like the perfect quagmire... another place where proxy wars are fought endlessly..
Posted by: james | Feb 18 2020 20:11 utc | 3
How about this; The U$A should get the hell out unilaterality, and let the Afghani's make the decisions about their country. But no, the U$A can't do that, because our corporate monsters covet their resources, and strategic location.
Posted by: ben | Feb 18 2020 20:32 utc | 4
jackrabbit @ 2
This war, 18 years old, the longest in American history, no end in sight, is unwinnable. It always will be.
That was obvious to all from the beginning. An understatement of epic proportions. The relentless media push towards war and the bald faced lies coming out of DC are business as usual got the flags waving of the entertainment soaked US public.
Partition and endless fighting would be the perfect solution for those who pushed this forward behind the scenes.
Posted by: dltravers | Feb 18 2020 20:59 utc | 5
^1000Careerist lackeys serving the elites control the American press.
Ever pushing for war and inequality, covering up the oligarchy's crimes...
They are in reality shameless disinformers.
No wonder the world is in such terrible disarray.
"b" is Moon of Alabama's founding (and chief) editor. This site's purpose is to discuss politics, economics, philosophy and blogger Billmon's Whiskey Bar writings. Moon Of Alabama was opened as an independent, open forum for members of the Whiskey Bar community. Bernhard )"b") started and still runs the site. Once in a while you will also find posts and art from regular commentators. You can reach the current administrator of this site by emailing Bernhard at MoonofA@aol.com.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
It’s good to know about the various ethnic groups making up Afghanistan and that partition is a possibility. Unless the boundaries between the various groups are well defined partition will be messy and bloody.
It seems that the Russians Chinese Iranians etc are all playing America at its own regime-game play book. It is only a matter of time before the us and nato retrench to their exhausted and financially broke homelands. Danke sehr
Posted by: James McC | Feb 18 2020 19:50 utc | 1