Afghan presidential candidate Ashraf Ghani speaks during a news conference on Friday, Aug. 8, 2014, in Kabul as rival candidate Abdullah Abdullah, center, talks to Secretary of State John Kerry. On Thursday, Sept. 18, 2014, Afghan officials said differences over releasing results of the disputed presidential election are holding up final agreement on a power-sharing deal between the two candidates to succeed President Hamid Karzai. (Steven Beardsley/Stars and Stripes)
KABUL, Afghanistan — Differences over releasing results of the disputed presidential election are holding up final agreement on a power-sharing deal between the two candidates to succeed President Hamid Karzai and pave the way for finalizing a pact to allow U.S.-led troops to remain in the country next year, officials from both camps said Thursday.
Aides to former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah and ex-Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani said Tuesday that the two sides were close to an agreement that would end months of uncertainty after a two-round election which both sides claim was rigged by the other.
The two have promised to accept the results of a U.N.-monitored investigation into vote-rigging, which included a massive ballot recount.
Kate Clark, a researcher with the Afghan Analysts Network, said the two camps were literally wrangling over the percentages of the election’s final results.
Representatives for both Ghani and Abdullah said the only significant unresolved issue was how to release the results of the U.N. audit, which reportedly invalidated a large number of suspected fraudulent ballots.
“Abdullah’s team asked that the audit results not show a big difference in order to avoid angering supporters of the losing candidate because this could trigger violence,” said a member of Ghani’s campaign, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
“Ghani disagreed with the request and asked that the election commission should announce the actual result of the audit,” he said.
Abdullah’s spokesman, Mujib Rahman Rahimi, confirmed on local radio that Abdullah’s representatives had raised this issue.
Both campaigns stressed that they had settled most of the outstanding issues involved in establishing a new chief executive’s position in the Cabinet that would be chosen by the losing candidate — presumably Abdullah.
The U.S. and NATO are anxious for a president to be named, as the clock is ticking on the deadline for all foreign combat troops to withdraw by the end of the year. The terms for a follow-on mission of nearly 10,000 U.S. forces acting mostly as advisers and trainers are laid out in a bilateral security agreement agreed early this year. But Karzai refused to sign it. Both candidates have said they would, but until they do, a similar NATO agreement is also on hold.
The U.S. proposed formation of a unity government as a way to break the impasse after Abdullah claimed “industrial-scale” fraud in the Aprll election, in which he led, and the June runoff in which initial results showed Ghani with a commanding lead, prompting the a U.N.-supervised audit of the 8 million ballots cast.
The audit was completed last week, but the results have not yet been announced.
Local media reported that representatives of the two campaigns were meeting in the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. An embassy spokeswoman refused to confirm that, but said U.S. Ambassador James Cunningham was directly engaged in the talks.
On Wednesday, State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters in Washington that Cunningham and the special representative for Afghanistan/Pakistan, Dan Feldman, were “both on the ground there talking to each of the candidates, helping move this forward, and hopefully as soon as possible.”
Zubair Babakarkhail contributed to this report.
