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.
