Pashtun Ashraf Ghani is the new president of Afghanistan
Kabul (AsiaNews) - Ashraf Ghani will be the new president of Afghanistan. Three months after a disputed ballot and mutual accusations of fraud - which threatened to plunge the country into renewed political instability - the two presidential candidates yesterday signed an agreement to form a government of national unity, in the presence of outgoing Head of State Hamid Karzai . The pact created the figure of the "chief executive", a sort of prime minister, which will go to the runner up Abdullah Abdullah.
Last April, Abdullah Abdullah won
the first round in the election, but without an absolute
majority. Against all odds, the
runoff overturned the results and
declared the victory of Ghani
with 55% of the vote. Abdullah accused his
opponent of vote rigging, but with the intervention of the United States the two candidates agreed to a hold a new ballot.
Thanks to this mediation,
Washington hopes to have paved the way
for an extension in its troop presence in the nation beyond the
date set for the withdrawal
of foreign troops by the end of this year. "The United States - says Omar Samad,
former Afghan ambassador to France - cannot
ignore its investments over the past
13 years, or endanger the
security situation in a time when
the Middle East and Islamic countries
face the new threat of 'IS".
The United States will offer Ghani a
bilateral agreement on security - currently stalled -
that would allow the American military to remain in the country and unlock billions of dollars which
Afghanistan needs to fight the
Taliban.
Pashtun (the ethnic majority -ed),
the 65-year old Ghani
is the second president to be
democratically elected since the US invasion in 2001. He served as Finance
Minister from 2002 to 2004 and is
a former economist at the World
Bank. Abdullah Abdullah,
an ethnic Tajik, was foreign minister
from 2001 to 2005.
When Ghani and
Abdullah agreed for the ballot to be
re-held, a source for AsiaNews in
Kabul, anonymous for security reasons,
admitted: "I do not have a preference between
the two candidates, but I would like the new head of state to be, at least once,
not Pashtun. With
a population as varied as the Afghans are, this would be a true
expression of democracy".
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