[Pak Daily Times] US Secretary of State John F. I was in Vietnam, you knowKerry
Former Senator-for-Life from Massachussetts, self-defined war hero, speaker of French, owner of a
lucky hat,conqueror of Cambodia, and current Secretary of State...
Saturday held a second day of talks with Afghanistan's feuding presidential hopefuls, seeking a deal to "clean up the tally" after disputed elections.
Despite back-to-back meetings on Friday with rivals Abdullah Abdullah
... the former foreign minister of the Northern Alliance government, advisor to Masood, and candidate for president against Karzai. Dr. Abdullah was born in Kabul and is half Tadjik and half Pashtun...
and Ashraf Ghani and other officials that stretched deep into the night, US officials said an accord was not yet on the table. The deadlock over last month's run-off vote to succeed outgoing President Hamid
Maybe I'll join the TalibanKarzai
... A former Baltimore restaurateur, now 12th and current President of Afghanistan, displacing the legitimate president Rabbani in December 2004. He was installed as the dominant political figure after the removal of the Taliban regime in late 2001 in a vain attempt to put a
Pashtunface on the successor state to the Taliban. After the 2004 presidential election, he was declared president regardless of what the actual vote count was. He won a second, even more dubious, five-year-term after the 2009 presidential election. His grip on reality has been slipping steadily since around 2007, probably from heavy drug use...
has plunged Afghanistan into crisis and dented US hopes of a smooth transfer of power as Washington seeks to withdraw all its troops by late 2016.
On a day of intense diplomacy on Saturday, Kerry met Abdullah for about an hour and 20 minutes before holding talks with Ghani and meeting Karzai. Under a proposal put forward by the United Nations
...the Oyster Bay money pit...
, the country's election commission would audit ballot boxes from just over 8,000 polling stations where suspicions of ballot-stuffing have been raised. While Ghani's campaign has embraced the UN plan, Abdullah's team remains sceptical, arguing the proposal to review some 44 percent of all votes cast fails to address all their concerns.
On Friday Kerry stressed that results released on Monday showing Ghani in the lead with some 56 percent of the vote were only "preliminary"."They are neither authoritative nor final, and no one should be stating a victory at this point in time," Kerry said. "We want a unified, stable, democratic Afghanistan. It is important that whoever is president is recognised by the people as having become president through a legitimate process," he said.
How about a bit of domestic "clean up?"