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Afghanistan's Karzai meets chief rival over new cabinet post
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has met his chief election rival Yunus Qanooni to discuss a possible role for him in the new government, an official close to the president said. Karzai, who will be inaugurated as Afghanistan's first democratically elected president on December 7, is expected to form his cabinet the following week. He met Qanooni late Wednesday and they discussed the cabinet, the official, who asked to not be named, told AFP the same day. "There is a strong possibility that Qanooni will join the new cabinet," he added.
| That'd be a good thing, I think. Qanoodi's one of the good guys. |
Karzai, who won 55.4 percent of the vote in the October 9 election, faces a tough challenge picking a government to tackle regional warlordism, an insurgency led by the former Taliban rulers and a burgeoning drug industry, which threatens to turn Afghanistan into a narco state. Karzai, an ethnic Pashtun, must also ensure that the ethnic Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara minorities are represented in his new administration. Karzai has repeatedly said he does not intend to appoint a cabinet of warlords or people with a brutal military past — and many ordinary Afghans voted for him in hopes he would end the rule of the gun in the war-torn country. Qanooni, who resigned, as education minister in Karzai's US-backed transitional administration to run against his former boss, is an ethnic Tajik. He was a lieutenant of assassinated resistance hero Ahmad Shah Masood and has close ties to the Northern Alliance group of commanders who ousted the hardline Islamic Taliban regime in conjunction with a US-led air campaign in late 2001. Although Qanooni came a distant second to Karzai in the polls, winning only a little over 16 per cent of the vote, he represents an important power block. He hails from the resistance stronghold of the Panjshir valley north of Kabul along with Defence Minister Marshal Mohammed Qasim Fahim and Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah. Karzai did not win strong support in parts of northern Afghanistan, drawing his votes mainly from the Pashtun-dominated south and east of the country.
| I'd guess most of Qanooni's support came from the north... |
Qanooni could not immediately be reached for comment. But an official close to him confirmed to AFP that he had held a private meeting with Karzai in the president's heavily fortified palace. "Yes, I can confirm that the meeting took place," the official told AFP declining to give further details.
Posted by: Steve White 2004-12-03 |
