Ghani Takes the Oath of Afghan President. His Rival Does, Too. - The New York Times

KABUL, Afghanistan — Just a few minutes and a thin wall apart, both President Ashraf Ghani and his chief rival, Abdullah Abdullah, took the oath of office as the president of Afghanistan on Monday, plunging the fragile country into a new crisis during sensitive peace talks.

As both men were delivering their speeches broadcast on split screens across the country, a barrage of rockets landed in the capital near the site of the ceremonies. Sirens blared in the diplomatic area near the presidential palace.

Mr. Ghani’s inauguration was briefly interrupted, with some in the audience running for cover. But the president refused to leave the stage and urged calm.

“I am not wearing an armored vest,” Mr. Ghani said, opening his jacket. “We have seen big attacks. A couple explosions shouldn’t scare us.”

The capital city had remained under lockdown for much of Monday, as marathon efforts led by U.S. diplomats failed to prevent a split government after a monthslong election dispute. President Ghani, who was declared the winner of a bitterly disputed vote, had announced that he was going ahead with his inauguration. Mr. Abdullah, who accuses Mr. Ghani of winning unfairly through fraud, had said that he would hold a simultaneous swearing-in next door.

Mr. Abdullah was the chief executive of the coalition government brokered by the United States when a previous election in 2014 also ended in a messy stalemate. Out of four total presidential elections in Afghanistan since the U.S. invasion in 2001, this is the third to be bitterly disputed and to require American mediation. Mr. Abdullah has been at the center of all three.

All of this played out in the middle of a negotiated peace plan between the United States and the Taliban, which calls for a full U.S. military withdrawal over the next 14 months as well as the start of direct talks between the Afghan government and the insurgent group.

The Afghan government is supposed to be preparing for those talks, which were expected to begin on Tuesday but will now face a delay. The political conflict in Kabul has threatened to unravel the democratic side from within even before it sits across the table from the Taliban.

Mr. Ghani was declared the winner by a margin of about 12,000 votes above the minimum 50 percent required. Mr. Abdullah’s team has disputed about 15 percent of the total vote. They accuse Mr. Ghani of pressuring the election commission to rush the process of auditing the questionable votes, making sure he begins his second term in office before progress in peace talks shifts the conversation to power-sharing with the Taliban. Mr. Ghani’s advisers said the election crisis needed to be brought to a conclusion so that a government with a clear mandate could lead the talks with the Taliban.

“If we had accepted the results of fraud as expediency, it would have been the funeral of democracy in this country,” Mr. Abdullah told his supporters after taking the presidential oath on Monday.

A previous attempt by Mr. Ghani to hold his swearing-in late last month was delayed by U.S. shuttle diplomacy, as it would have brought the dispute to a crisis point on the eve of the Taliban and United States signing their deal in Qatar, officials said.

The political crisis has delayed preparations for the Afghan government’s talks with the Taliban. An increasingly fraught disagreement between Mr. Ghani’s government and the U.S. negotiating team over the potential release of thousands of Taliban prisoners has threatened to collapse the process in a different way.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. special envoy for the talks, came to Kabul soon after signing the deal with the Taliban, in hopes of figuring out a solution between Mr. Ghani and Mr. Abdullah to keep the government from splitting. He shuttled between the two leaders half a dozen times on Sunday, officials said, with the meetings stretching to the early hours of Monday.

Mr. Khalilzad even briefly managed to get Mr. Ghani and Mr. Abdullah to meet face to face close to midnight, but there was no breakthrough.

Mr. Khalilzad; Gen. Austin S. Miller, the commander of U.S. NATO forces in Afghanistan; and dozens of other diplomats attended Mr. Ghani’s inauguration, which was administered by the Afghan chief justice. No senior diplomat was seen at Mr. Abdullah’s ceremony next door, which was administered by a religious cleric.

In Mr. Ghani’s remarks, there was a suggestion of a compromise on the release of as many as 5,000 Taliban prisoners, something his government had repeatedly said was an impossible request in such an early stage of the peace process.

“We have reached a framework that in return for the release of prisoners there will be a tangible and measurable reduction in violence,” Mr. Ghani said, promising to put out a decree with details on Tuesday.

Advisers to Mr. Abdullah said they had been ready to find a solution to the crisis in the form of an all-inclusive government, something not unlike the current setup negotiated by Secretary of State John Kerry after the 2014 vote ended in a stalemate. The Abdullah team’s bottom line was that whatever form the government took, nothing should validate an official victory through the vote for Mr. Ghani.

Mr. Ghani’s advisers said they were willing to accommodate Mr. Abdullah through a “solution in accordance with the Constitution,” essentially ruling out Mr. Abdullah’s continuing in his current extraconstitutional role as chief executive but offering some cabinet positions to his allies and a role for Mr. Abdullah in the talks with the Taliban. But they said that Mr. Abdullah’s demands had made that impossible.

The inaugurations, scheduled for Monday morning, were pushed to the afternoon for one last sprint of diplomacy. State television broadcast drone footage of the palace boulevards lined with large Afghan flags for the occasion. Representatives and diplomats from 45 countries were invited to Mr. Ghani’s event, along with about 2,500 domestic guests, his inauguration officials said.

Mr. Abdullah’s team announced hours later that they had issued 10,000 invitation cards, including to diplomats in Kabul.

Around 2 a.m. Monday, a senior adviser to Mr. Abdullah said on Twitter that the American side had told them that Mr. Ghani had agreed to postpone his inauguration to allow more time for negotiations. One adviser to Mr. Abdullahsaid that Mr. Khalilzad had managed to persuade Mr. Ghani to postpone after getting Secretary of State Mike Pompeo into the conversation. There was no immediate confirmation of that claim from American officials.

But hours later, around 6 a.m., Shahhusain Murtazawi, a senior adviser to Mr. Ghani, said the inauguration was going ahead on Monday as planned.

Omar Zakhelwal, a former Afghan finance minister and a former adviser to Mr. Ghani, said he was watching the “drama” live on television.

“This stuff is real!” he tweeted about the dueling inaugurations. “After the conclusion we’ll be the 1st real République des Bananes!”

For many Afghans, the political crisis has been a draining distraction from more dire challenges facing the country, including the resumption of fighting with the Taliban, the spreading of coronavirus, and poverty rates that are growing worse by day.

“I am a member of the cheering squad. We are here to clap and cheer when they speak,” said Noorullah, a teenager from Parwan Province, who was at Mr. Abdullah’s inauguration among more of his supporters. “I don’t care about any of them because they don’t care about the country — just look at where the price of potatoes has come to.”

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2020-03-09 15:48:02Z
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