Word: karzai
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Threats may be inevitable in a race in which at least five candidates are linked to private armies. Karzai's main rival, Yunus Qanooni, 43, is a former resistance leader who still commands loyalty from Tajik fighters in the north. In hundreds of the country's 5,000 polling stations, it will be Qanooni's men who stand guard, raising the prospect of intimidation. Many voters think that somehow the commanders will know whether they have betrayed them on the ballot. Says Sifton: "The vast majority of voters don't understand that their ballot will be kept secret." Karzai...
Even without such threats, Karzai would win a first-round majority of 51% in a fair and free race, say international poll observers. Karzai is considered one of the few candidates who don't have blood on their hands from the bitter 1992-96 civil war. (Massouda Jalal, a plainspoken doctor and the sole woman in the field, is another.) Nor is Karzai pushing the interests of his fellow Pashtuns ahead of other ethnic groups. Pragmatic Afghans realize that foreign aid, which totaled $2.3 billion this year, might dry up if Karzai, who is well respected in the West, were...
...Karzai has some legitimate campaign challenges. A senior Afghan official says Iran, Russia and Pakistan are throwing money at different candidates. A Kabul black-market money changer claimed that the dollar's recent rise against the afghani, from 52 to 45, was due to the sudden influx of dollars. "In my village," says Fida Mohammed, who is from the Shomali Plain near Kabul, "our elders are seeing who offers us most before telling us how we should vote...
Alarmed by the possibility that Karzai might not win in the first round (experts say he would win a runoff against any single candidate), the President's supporters--including the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad--are scrambling to shore up votes. Senior Afghan officials, U.N. representatives and Western diplomats all claim that Khalilzad, an energetic Afghan American, is trying to induce several candidates--including the President's main rival, Qanooni--to drop out and throw their support behind Karzai. The ambassador denies that, even though one candidate, Mohammed Mohaqiq, went public with such an accusation. Khalilzad and Karzai dine...
...decisively, Karzai needs support from his Pashtuns, many of whom are facing the threat of marauding Taliban and alQaeda fighters. It is a measure of the desperation of Karzai's supporters that a pro-Taliban tribal chieftain, Naim Kochi, was released two weeks ago from American custody in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he had been held for having truck with renegade anti-U.S. commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Kochi was sprung because he could deliver more than 55,000 votes from his Ahmedzai tribe, according to an influential tribesman involved in the negotiations. But after his two years in Gitmo...