Skip to main content

Taliban worries loom as Afghanistan prepares to vote for a president

KABUL: Millions of Afghans are expected to brave the threat of militant attacks to vote in a presidential election on Saturday, hoping to prevent a repeat of a bitter, fraud-marred and ultimately unresolved poll in 2014.

About a dozen candidates are in the fray for the presidency but the incumbent President Ashraf Ghani and his chief executive Abdullah Abdullah are the top contenders for the job at a time when Taliban insurgents have intensified attacks.

The 70-year-old Ghani and Abdullah, 59, have ruled through a fractured power-sharing arrangement since 2014, their forces fighting against the Taliban even as the rebels held peace talks with the United States that were later abandoned.

The Taliban hold more territory now than at any time since 2001 when their regime was overthrown by a US-led invasion.

“People of Afghanistan will defend their free and fair votes. I know Afghans will protect democracy,” Ghani said at an election rally, adding the hardline Islamist group was unable to defeat the Afghan people’s inherent spirit of freedom and desire for progress.

Militants hold more territory now than at any time since 2001

However, more than 170 civilians have been killed and more than 300 wounded in attacks involving the Taliban in the run-up to the election.

“Stay away from polling stations on election day,” the Taliban warned in their latest statement.

On Friday, a Taliban spokesman said in a statement that the group had captured the Darah Sof Payan district of northern Samangan province, another sign of the growing strength of the insurgency.

Despite decades of war, 9.67 million Afghans were registered to vote in 2019 out of a population estimated at 34 million.

To fight the militants, the country will deploy more than 100,000 members of the security forces, according to two senior security officials in Kabul.

The Afghan government allocated $90 million and international donors have given $59 million to conduct elections across 34 provinces, but hundreds of polling stations in schools and mosques are likely to remain closed following Taliban threats.

Ghani’s rival, Abdullah, has accused the president of abuse of power and using government resources in his election campaign.

Abdullah said he feared the outcome could be skewed by voter fraud and that would threaten the country’s unstable democracy.

“He (Ghani) has been a hurdle, an obstacle towards peace. This person is not suitable for the job,” he told Reuters on Thursday.

If there are “massively fraudulent elections, and somebody is announced as a winner, this will not be accepted,” he added.

Western and Asian diplomats in Kabul said the fear of Taliban violence has sapped enthusiasm for the vote, with some expecting a record low turnout.

Other fears include the disenfranchisement of women. Mandatory photos for voting risk excluding women in conservative areas where they keep their faces covered outside their homes.

Published in Dawn, September 28th, 2019



from The Dawn News - Home https://ift.tt/2o1y9oV
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Trump says he urged team to ‘slow’ COVID-19 testing

US President Donald Trump said Saturday he was encouraging health officials in his administration to slow down coronavirus testing, arguing that increased tests lead to more cases being discovered. The president has claimed falsely on several occasions that surges of COVID-19 in several states can be explained by greater numbers of diagnostic tests. At his first rally since the outbreak forced nationwide shutdowns in March, Trump told the crowd in Tulsa, Oklahoma that testing was a “double-edged sword.” The United States — which has more deaths and cases than any other country — has carried out more than 25 million coronavirus tests, placing it outside the top 20 countries in the world, per capita. “Here is the bad part: When you do testing to that extent, you are going to find more people, you will find more cases,” Trump argued. “So I said to my people ‘slow the testing down.’ They test and they test.” It was not clear from Trump’s tone if he was playing to the crowd, who ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sir Anwer Pervez, richest Pakistani British businessman, loses £432m in pandemic

Sir Anwar Pervez OBE, the founder and chairman of Bestway Cash & Carry has lost £432 million during the coronavirus pandemic to bring him down to No 50 on the richest British people list. The list has 1,000 people and is published by the Sunday Times newspaper . Pervez was at No 42 previously.  The 2020 list of the UK’s richest shows its first fall in wealth in a decade as Britain’s wealthiest people lost tens of billions of pounds in the coronavirus pandemic, the Sunday Times reported in its Rich List 2020. The newspaper, which has produced the respected annual ranking of the country’s 1,000 wealthiest people since 1989, found the past two months had resulted in the super-rich losing £54 billion ($65 billion). More than half of the billionaires in Britain had seen drops in their worth by as much as £6b, a decrease in their collective wealth unprecedented since 2009 and the financial crisis. The Hinduja brothers, who topped last year’s list with a £22b fortune, saw among ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Despite reservations about jury, Pakistan to implement FATF reforms: envoy

WASHINGTON: Despite its reservations about the fairness of the jury which is to determine Pakistan’s performance against terror financing, the government is committed to implementing its action plan for dealing with this issue, says Islamabad’s Washington envoy Asad Majeed Khan. In a conversation with a prominent US scholar George Perkovich, recorded at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington on Monday afternoon, Ambassador Khan said the actions that Pakistan had taken so far to eliminate terror financing were “reflective of the political will”. “We feel that we have done a lot. We are also clear and determined to do more,” said the envoy while responding to a question about a meeting of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) held in Orlando last week, which asked Pakistan to implement its own action plan for eliminating terror financing by October. Failing to do so could put Pakistan on a blacklist of violators and bring strict economic sanctions too. “But we w...
Post a Comment
Read more