... 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...
on Sunday withdrew his support from an anti-fraud audit of votes, as US-led efforts to keep the election on track descended into further uncertainty.
The country's first democratic transfer of power has been engulfed in a dispute over alleged fraud, wrecking hopes that the election would be seen as a key achievement of the international military and civilian aid effort since 2001.
Instead, the contest between Abdullah, a former anti-Taliban resistance fighter, and Ashraf Ghani, an ex-World Bank economist, threatens to spark a spiral of instability as NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It's headquartered in Belgium. That sez it all....
troops pull out and violence increases nationwide.
After Abdullah rejected preliminary results that named Ghani as the winner of the June 14 election, 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...
flew to Kabul and persuaded the two candidates to agree to the audit to sift out fraudulent votes.
But the UN-supervised process triggered another outbreak of disagreements, and Abdullah's campaign on Sunday refused to rejoin the process after repeated stoppages.
"The UN had promised us that they would only begin again after our concerns are met, but, despite that, the process has resumed," Baryalai Arsalai, Abdullah's campaign manager, told news hounds. "This is a continuation of illegal action by the IEC (Independent Election Commission) and we condemn it."
Abdullah's team also alleged on Sunday that second Vice President Karim Khalili had been caught on tape saying that 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...
was working illegally in favor of Ghani.