Karzai poll plan 'a Putin strategy'

Amanda Hodge
Saturday, 28-April-2012

 

AFGHAN President Hamid Karzai has flagged the possibility of an early presidential election in what critics fear is an attempt to manipulate polls to establish a dynastic succession.

Mr. Karzai told a press conference in Kabul he was considering vacating the presidential palace a year earlier than May 2014; when his second five-year term is due to expire.

"I have been talking about this for a few months now," Mr. Karzai said late on Thursday night.

"With all the changes that are taking place - with the complete return of international forces to their homes from Afghanistan and the holding of the presidential election at the same time - whether that will be an agenda that we can handle at the same time ... is a question that I've had and I've frequently raised it in my inner circle."

Western diplomats are understood to favor an early poll and are pressuring Mr. Karzai to call an election well ahead of the final December 2014 NATO withdrawal so foreign troops can help with election security.

The 2009 presidential poll in which Mr. Karzai was re-elected despite proven allegations of massive ballot-box rigging was a severe embarrassment to the international coalition, which sank hundreds of millions of dollars into ensuring free and fair elections.

Mr. Karzai's announcement of a possible early poll has sparked renewed concerns the besieged President does not intend to step down from office, as he insists he will, and as the Afghan constitution requires him to do.

Many opposition politicians and some political analysts suspect Mr. Karzai of orchestrating a Vladimir Putin-style power-swap in which he installs a pliable candidate into the presidency so that he may return to the palace in five years' time.

Those fears will be only heightened by an admission by the President's brother, Mahmoud Karzai, this week that preparations had begun to try to keep the presidential palace in the family, by fielding the oldest surviving Karzai brother, Abdul Qayum, as a succession candidate.

"We are in the process of doing some work in that regard," Mahmoud told The Times, adding Mr. Karzai's success in uniting Afghans and maintaining rule of law had given a "positive image to our family".

"There are a lot of people who would like to see another Karzai government."

Mahmoud ruled himself out of presidential contention.

But he said Abdul Qayum, a businessman who divides his time between his US restaurant and Afghanistan, where he acts as a presidential adviser, was "very clever, very intelligent, extremely cautious".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

    

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