A Technocrat Shakes Up the Afghan Campaign

By CARLOTTA GALL

KABUL, Afghanistan — Whether wrapped in a shawl for a televised debate, sitting on a dirt floor with a shopkeeper, or thundering over speakers in a dust storm, Ashraf Ghani, the most educated and Westernized of Afghanistan’s presidential candidates, is shaking up the campaign before Thursday’s election in unusual ways.

A former finance minister with a background in American academia and at the World Bank, Mr. Ghani, 60, says he is trying to change politics in Afghanistan. Using television and radio, Internet donations and student volunteers, as well as traditional networks like religious councils, he is seeking to reach out to young people, women and the poor, and do the unexpected: defeat President Hamid Karzai.

Mr. Ghani’s national support is hard to gauge — one recent poll put it at just 4 percent — and he probably remains an outsider in the race, trailing Mr. Karzai and his main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, both of whom have much larger power bases.

Yet Mr. Ghani is elevating the debate with a focus on policy and a detailed plan for reform, challenging the Afghan electorate to think beyond the status quo.

“The people, the nature of mobilization, the talk has changed, anyplace I go,” he said in an early morning interview at his home in Kabul before setting off by helicopter to campaign in the provinces. “Afghans have a very different expectation of leadership today than they have ever had.”

A two-hour live television and radio debate between Mr. Ghani and Mr. Abdullah on July 23, watched and heard by over 10 million people, has created a huge change in thinking, Mr. Ghani said. Mr. Karzai declined to participate, something his two opponents have used against him.

Since the debate, a flow of student volunteers has come forward to work for his campaign, Mr. Ghani said, and people from all walks — pilots, merchants, professors — have engaged him in detailed discussion of his ideas.

Articulate in several languages, Mr. Ghani has written two books, one titled “Fixing Failed States,” and the other a detailed plan on how to lift Afghanistan out of poverty and instability within 10 years, which is essentially his election manifesto.

Mr. Ghani has been one of the most influential figures involved in building the current Afghan state. Appointed finance minister in 2002, he instituted a centralized revenue collection scheme, and oversaw the flow of billions of dollars of foreign assistance into the war-torn country.

Yet his scrupulousness made him enemies and, disillusioned with official corruption and Mr. Karzai’s leadership, he left the cabinet in 2004.

Such is his experience, and his support in Washington, that Mr. Ghani is among the contenders mentioned to fill a strong executive position under the president that is being proposed by American officials to strengthen the government’s performance should Mr. Karzai win another term.

Mr. Ghani, whose campaign has hired the political strategist James Carville as a consultant, says it is too early to discuss post-election scenarios. He was once a close adviser to the president, but his distaste for Mr. Karzai’s way of running things is deep-seated, and he has been an outspoken critic of the way politics have been conducted in Afghanistan.

He has been the most vociferous of any candidate in challenging Mr. Karzai’s overstaying his constitutional mandate, which was extended in order to hold the election on Aug. 20, and also in accusing the president of using government resources and officials to promote his campaign. And he has castigated the election organizers, both foreign and Afghan, for allowing fraud and manipulation to occur unchecked.

He has also rejected the backroom deal-making for which Mr. Karzai has been strongly criticized, and has refused overtures from Mr. Karzai to give up his candidacy and join his campaign, something a number of other prospective candidates have done.

At election rallies, he vows to curb government corruption and so find the revenue to create a million jobs and a million houses.

He promises better education for the young, by increasing the number of mosques and madrasas to provide a general education at the village level. He also proposes adding universities and women’s colleges, as there are thousands more students than universities can accommodate.

And he lays out how to develop Afghanistan’s natural resources and create economic growth with Afghan labor, and bring justice and peace through local structures.

He makes gibes that Mr. Karzai has to block streets when he travels through the city, or hide behind the palace walls, and suggested at one rally that Mr. Karzai and his entire cabinet go to live in the Pul-i-Charki jail. He accuses him of losing the trust of the people by lying to them.

He also promises to return sovereignty to Afghanistan, by closing the detention center at Bagram, the United States air base outside Kabul, within three years. And he advocates negotiating a cease-fire with the Taliban, prior to a process of reconciliation. “Afghan blood is being spilt,” he said at a rally in a Kabul suburb. “We want to stop it and douse the fire.”

His main drawback is his aloofness. When serving in the cabinet, he came under criticism that after 24 years living away from Afghanistan, nearly half his life, he was out of touch with the people and too abrasive in his dealings with his fellow Afghans.

He left the country in the 1970s to study at the American University of Beirut, went on to earn a doctorate in anthropology at Columbia in 1982, and taught at Johns Hopkins University. In 1991, he joined the World Bank.

Like other Western-educated technocrats, he encountered on his return the resentment of those Afghans who had had no chance to leave and had suffered 30 years of war and privation.

But he says that is changing. He has sought to get closer to the Afghan people by holding an open house for the last 18 months and says he has received over 100,000 people from all over the country, which has informed the development of his policies.

“It has been the largest seminar in my life and I have been the sole student,” he said. “I connect back to the people because I have heard them, and I have heard some very harsh things. It’s been a relationship.”

Critically, ethnic Pashtuns who make up the largest ethnic group and have traditionally ruled Afghanistan, now see that there is a strong alternative to Mr. Karzai, he said. Mr. Ghani, like Mr. Karzai, is Pashtun.

“Pashtuns in the north have reassessed and I think they are going to abandon Karzai,” Mr. Ghani said.

He claimed, too, that groups in the western province of Herat and in the southern provinces, where the Taliban insurgency is strongest, were also moving away from the president. “There’s a swing,” Mr. Ghani predicted, with election day fast approaching. “There’s a massive swing.”

Bombs Kill 14 Civilians

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Two explosions in southern Afghanistan killed 14 people, including 3 children at play, Afghan officials said Thursday, as mounting violence before next week’s elections exacts an increasing toll on civilians caught up in the broadening war with the Taliban.

Dawoud Ahmadi, a spokesman for the Helmand provincial authorities, said a roadside bomb exploded next to a van carrying civilians, killing 11, including 2 women, in the province’s Gereshk district. “The Taliban have planted mines everywhere,” Mr. Ahmadi said. “That’s why most of the time, civilians are the targets.”

The Taliban offered no immediate comment on that explosion or another in Mirwais Mina, near Kandahar, that killed the three children. Some reports said the children, ages 8 to 12, were playing with a bomb they had found on the side of a road. Abdul Ahmad, a police official, said that it seemed that the bomb had been planted recently “in an area where children and people are walking freely.”

An American serving with NATO forces in the south was also killed Thursday, The Associated Press reported, quoting a military news release that attributed the death to “a direct fire attack.”

Ruhullah Khapalwak contributed reporting.

With Karzai Favored to Win, U.S. Calibrates Criticism to Keep Options Open

By Joshua Partlow and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, August 14, 2009

KABUL -- The last time Hamid Karzai ran for president, in 2004, he was clearly America's man in Afghanistan. U.S. military helicopters shuttled him between campaign stops. At his inauguration, Vice President Richard B. Cheney was there to hail the day as a major moment "in the history of human freedom."

With a new round of voting one week away -- and Karzai favored to win another term -- a less-enamored Obama administration is looking for ways to lessen U.S. reliance on the Afghan president by working more closely with favored ministers and bolstering the authority of provincial and local leaders, according to American and Afghan officials.

The goals reflect frustration among U.S. officials over Karzai's performance in the past five years, particularly his seeming indifference to the widespread corruption within his government. But as it increasingly appears that Karzai will be its partner over the next five years, the United States has also sought to preserve a relationship with him.

"Because they couldn't construct a plan to replace Karzai, I think they toned down the criticism and kept the option open of working with Karzai, should he get reelected," said Zalmay Khalilzad, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. "I think some administration officials realized that by being so openly critical of Karzai, they faced the risk that they could get a Karzai who was not only reelected but was hostile to the U.S. because of how he had been treated."

The United States is "actively impartial" in the Aug. 20 vote, said Jane Marriott, a senior adviser to U.S. special representative Richard C. Holbrooke. But according to Afghan Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta, U.S. officials back the idea of a new chief executive position under Karzai to add coherence and competence to his struggling bureaucracy.

"I know that in Washington this idea has strong supporters," Spanta said in an interview, adding that installing a "shadow prime-minister" would pose constitutional problems.

U.S. officials have discussed the proposal with a key Karzai challenger, the technocratic former finance minister Ashraf Ghani, though they have not endorsed him for the job.

Rather than "just pouring money into building the government," Holbrooke adviser Barnett R. Rubin said, the administration is focused on "rebuilding the relationship between subnational authorities and local communities." Rubin stressed that such activities were being undertaken in cooperation with the central government in Kabul.

Critical of some of Karzai's cabinet choices, the administration has praised the competence of presidentially appointed local leaders such as the governor of Helmand province, Gulab Mangal. Plans by the U.S. Defense and State departments call for installing American "mentors" and liaisons in Afghan ministries in Kabul, a policy that was heavily used during the early years of the U.S. military occupation of Iraq.

President Obama has called the Afghan election, the second since the Taliban regime's ouster in 2001, the most important event of the year in this country. Originally scheduled for April, the vote was postponed during what Holbrooke called a "crisis" period of Afghan constitutional and security upheaval. As a result, Holbrooke said, the Obama administration was forced to defer other priorities in Afghanistan and spend "most of the spring" sorting out the electoral crisis.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the new U.S. military commander here, has postponed completion of his review of the security situation, originally due to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates this weekend, in part because of the upcoming presidential and provincial council elections. "This is our main effort. I don't want anybody to think we're not anything but completely focused on this," McChrystal said.

"Until the election legitimizes the government, whoever wins, we have to focus on that," Holbrooke said. Holbrooke, Marriott and Rubin spoke at a media event in Washington on Wednesday.

U.S. officials here said their primary interest now is a fair and free election campaign in which the candidates -- 3,324 people have registered for 420 provincial council seats, and 41 are vying to be president -- debate the issues. The officials also say they want a vote unmarred by fraud or violence, results that Afghans accept as legitimate and a government that responds to the needs of the people.

"We're very careful not to conjecture. What we're clear about is regardless of who comes into power, there needs to be much greater demand for accountability," said a U.S. official involved in the election process.

Of the leading presidential candidates, Karzai remains the clear favorite. A U.S.-funded poll released this week found that 45 percent of decided voters favored him, compared with 25 percent for his closest rival, Abdullah Abdullah, an ophthalmologist and former foreign minister. The margin is significant because Karzai, who won in 2004 with 55 percent of the vote, would need to clear 50 percent to forestall a runoff.

The question of who, if anyone, the United States backs has been important from the beginning, although candidates have had to walk a fine line in simultaneously portraying themselves as acceptable to Americans and able to keep U.S. funding flowing, but distant enough not to be seen as an American puppet. Four prominent Afghan politicians, including Abdullah and Ghani, the former finance minister, attended Obama's inauguration in January. Karzai, however, was absent, and a narrative developed early on that Obama was eager for a change at the top in Afghanistan. Ghani and Abdullah have told people privately that the United States gave them the green light to run for president, according to a former U.S. official here.

Karzai was angered when U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry appeared beside Ghani and Abdullah at news conferences in June, although Eikenberry stressed impartiality in his remarks. A week and a half after Karzai failed to show up at Afghanistan's first televised debate, against Abdullah and Ghani, Eikenberry published an op-ed in The Washington Post calling for "serious debate among the candidates."

Despite the administration's denials, many in Afghanistan view these developments as a message that the Americans favored Karzai's rivals.

"The U.S. has certainly tried to undermine Karzai's leadership," said Haroun Mir, director of Afghanistan's Center for Research and Policy Studies. But the failure of rival candidates to unite on a ticket dashed what appeared to many observers to be a U.S. hope of an opposition coalition.

"I think the greatest pressure on the United States has been to convince Afghans and all the candidates that it is not interfering in the election one way or another," Vali Nasr, a senior Holbrooke aide, said in an interview. "What the U.S. has consistently said is that it wants an election that is free and fair, and does not lead to indecision, confusion or violence, that the elections would be followed quickly by getting back to business."

Concerns persist about Karzai's leadership on many levels, including his ability to address corruption, to project his power nationwide, to help stem rising Taliban violence and to outline a clearer plan for a peace process. U.S. officials have been critical of his decision on the campaign trail to surround himself with infamous commanders such as his running mate, the powerful Tajik leader Mohammed Fahim, and several others Karzai has courted in an attempt to secure ethnic and regional voting blocs.

Karzai has at times been critical of the U.S. presence, especially over the issue of civilian casualties in U.S. military operations. But in a speech this week, he said that he valued American sacrifices in the war and that "we will not only keep this strategic partnership with the U.S., but we also will improve it." At the same time, he demanded that coalition troops stop arresting Afghans and close all foreign prisons here.

Karzai's rivals describe him as paranoid about foreign intrigue.

"He considers everybody part of that big plot," Abdullah said. "In the meetings with elders and political leaders who have talked and spoken to me, he says this, 'We should unite. You know, there are plots, Americans, British,' and so on and so forth."

"His relations with the Americans?" Abdullah said. "What do you think? Everybody is stuck with him."

U.S. Officials See Karzai Rival Ghani as Potential Chief Executive

By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, August 11, 2009

KABUL, Aug. 10 -- Senior American officials are expressing renewed interest in a post-election plan for Afghanistan that would establish a chief executive to serve beneath President Hamid Karzai if he wins a second term next week, Afghan officials said Monday.

The latest U.S. overtures have focused on Ashraf Ghani, a former finance minister who is challenging Karzai for the presidency. A campaign aide to Ghani said Monday that both Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry and regional envoy Richard C. Holbrooke had made recent visits to explore the idea, a sign that the United States might be interested in an Afghan government with a more technocratic bent.

American officials have grown increasingly disenchanted with Karzai's leadership over the past five years, amid rising Taliban violence, rampant corruption and an ineffective bureaucracy. The idea of a chief executive for Afghanistan has circulated before in recent months, and speculation at one point arose that former U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan American, was in the running.

Ghani, a former finance minister with a doctorate from Columbia University, has worked for the World Bank and has a reputation as a competent technocrat. His work on Afghanistan's currency and budget during his time as a finance minister has drawn positive reviews, although colleagues have sometimes found him abrasive. As one of the main challengers to Karzai, who is the clear front-runner, Ghani has no plans to drop out of the race before the Aug. 20 election. He has been actively campaigning for president and plans to visit six provinces in the next eight days.

"I've been approached repeatedly; the offer is on the table. I have not accepted it," Ghani told reporters over the weekend, according to Reuters. He has not ruled out a position in the government if he loses.

Ongoing Negotiations

A spokesman for Karzai, Wahid Omar, would not confirm the specific offer from Karzai, but said there have been ongoing negotiations between the two campaigns. "Karzai does believe it is a good idea that someone like Ghani joins the team, and as a result the future government would be a stronger government," he said.

An Afghan official familiar with the negotiations said that Ghani expressed willingness to serve in a Karzai government, but that he wanted power to implement his own programs. The official, who requested anonymity in order to speak freely, said negotiations on the issue were ongoing.

In a poll released Monday, Karzai led with 45 percent of the vote among decided voters, compared with 25 percent for Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister. The U.S.-government-funded poll by Glevum Associates, conducted July 8-19, had Ghani fourth, with 4 percent of the vote.

During the campaign, Karzai has courted support from warlords, such as his running mate, Marshal Mohammed Fahim, the powerful Tajik leader, and Gen. Abdurrashid Dostum, an Uzbek commander accused of slaughtering Taliban prisoners in 2001. American officials have said they are concerned that important jobs after the election may be given away in patronage without a focus on competence.

An Antidote to Karzai?

Some see Ghani as a modern managerial antidote to Karzai, who is known more as a dealmaker among rival factions.

"Karzai doesn't think in terms of growth in GDP in Afghanistan, unemployment, more services or security," said Haroun Mir, director of Afghanistan's Center for Research & Policy Studies. "He's a consensus builder. As long as he could win a consensus of important power brokers, he thinks he's a very successful man."

The jockeying came amid further violence in Afghanistan, which has intensified ahead of the elections.

Taliban fighters using assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades attacked the governor's office and police headquarters in Logar province, killing at least six people, according to Afghan officials.

The attack set off hours of urban combat in the provincial capital of Pul-e-Alam, about 40 miles south of Kabul.

About half a dozen Taliban fighters staged their attack from a building adjacent to the governor's compound, firing automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades beginning about noon. A car bomb also exploded during the fighting, said Capt. Elizabeth Mathias, a U.S. military spokeswoman, while others described evidence of a suicide bombing. Din Mohammad Darwish, a spokesman for Logar's governor, said two policemen died along with four Taliban members.

"It was very serious fighting. We could hear a lot of machine-gun fire," said Abdul Hakim Suliamankhel, head of the provincial council in Logar. "The people are really scared now."

The Afghan National Police led the counterattack against the Taliban, eventually surrounding and entering the building, which they found rigged with explosives, according to a U.S. military statement. The police killed three Taliban fighters inside the building, Darwish said.

Special correspondent Javed Hamdard contributed to this report.