Word: abdullah
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Afghanistan's former Foreign Minister and current presidential aspirant Dr. Abdullah Abdullah refers to President Hamid Karzai as "that gentleman" with a kind of icy irony. Abdullah dismisses Karzai's suggestion that the two men - at loggerheads over the result of the Aug. 20 presidential poll, which Karzai says he won, and Abdullah says was rigged - should form a government of national unity. "I ran for a change in Afghanistan," Abdullah says. "Not for deal-making." And the U.N., which Abdullah blames for the poor organization of the polls and a pro-Karzai bias, doesn't escape his ire. "Right...
...wide-ranging interview with TIME, Abdullah rejected all talk of compromise over the disputed poll. Unofficial results give Karzai 54.6% of the vote and Abdullah just 27.8%. But European observers say that at least 1.5 million ballots - more than one-third of the total - may have been fraudulent. If, as opponents and foreign observers allege, most of the tainted ballots turn out to be for Karzai, that could drop the President below the 50% mark. "The international community has to ask itself: Will it tolerate this massive fraud?" Abdullah asks...
...fraudulent ballots subtracted, the incumbent may still have gathered more than 50% of the vote. This, they say, would spare Afghanistan and the international community another costly and potentially violent vote in the midst of winter blizzards. Hence all that talk of a backroom deal between Karzai and Abdullah, in which Karzai would remain President but Abdullah would be named as Prime Minister or some such role. (See pictures of British soldiers in Afghanistan...
...There is no confusion what Abdullah thinks should be done. A first-round Karzai victory, he warns, will mean a government with the same flaws as the old one. "The people who committed the fraud will want posts in the next Karzai government, and we'll have more of the same greed," Abdullah says. The presidential challenger advocates an interim caretaker government until a second round of voting takes place. "It's only by showing the credibility of the election process that we have any chance." Otherwise, "this country will slip out of our hands to the Taliban." (See pictures...
...struggle over the poll also highlights the country's age-old ethnic divide. In the August poll, Abdullah won a clear majority of the Tajik vote in the north; Karzai the Pashtun vote in the south. Abdullah's ties to the late warrior-poet, Ahmed Shah Masood, killed by al-Qaeda a few days before 9/11, help Abdullah's support in the north because Tajiks revere Masood as an exemplary leader who single-handedly held off the Soviets and the Taliban. On the other hand, Abdullah's Masood connection is a turnoff to many Pashtun tribesmen, who viewed Masood...