Election posters were going up in Afghanistan yesterday as two months of campaigning officially opened for the Aug. 20 presidential polls, which are being contested by 41 candidates.
Large posters were being fixed to telegraph poles across Kabul featuring some of the leading candidates, including incumbent Afghan President Hamid Karzai and former finance minister Ashraf Ghani.
Ghani, an academic promising “a new beginning,” invited people to meet him at his Kabul home, his campaign office said, adding that 3,000 were expected.
Another frontrunner, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah who says Afghanistan needs change, was expected to address a gathering at a Kabul hotel, his office said.
Karzai, on a state visit to Russia, would be represented at a press conference by his campaign organizers, a representative said.
Posters were also going up on walls and trees in the western city of Herat as vehicles were distributing pictures and leaflets, a reporter said.
KARZAI
Campaigning is expected to pick up in the coming weeks before closing three days before the election — Afghanistan’s second presidential poll.
Karzai won the first election in 2004 with 55.4 percent of the vote and is tipped by many observers to have a good chance at the upcoming elections, despite his choice of warlord Mohammed Qasim Fahim as a running mate.
However, support for Karzai has dropped sharply since his election, with fewer than one-third of Afghans supporting his re-election, according to the results of a poll released on Monday.
The poll, conducted by the International Republican Institute, a nonprofit pro-democracy group affiliated with the Republican Party and financed by the US government, found that only 31 percent of Afghans said they would vote for Karzai again. Fewer than half — 43 percent — said that Karzai’s performance warranted re-election.
Still, he easily outpaced a dozen of the other candidates. Abdullah, the former foreign minister, polled at 7 percent, and Ghani, the former finance minister, polled less than 3 percent.
A total of 3,200 Afghans were interviewed in person nationwide last month for the poll, which has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points, said Lisa Gates, a spokeswoman for the institute.
Still, the poll results suggested that Karzai could fall short of the 50 percent needed to forestall a run-off. In 2004, he was elected in the first round.
As president, Karzai has received much of the blame for the deterioration in security, though he is still widely considered the favorite to win in August.
Meanwhile, Al-Jazeera called for the immediate release of two of its Afghan producers after they were arrested by Afghan intelligence agents. The network said it has been unable to contact them.
PRODUCERS
Qais Azimy and Hamedullah Shah, who work for the network’s English and Arabic services, have been held by Afghan authorities since Sunday, the station said on Monday in a statement.
“Al-Jazeera is officially requesting information from the Afghan authorities and is calling for Qais and Hamedullah’s immediate release,” it said.
It was unclear why the two were arrested.
In a news report over the weekend from the northern Afghan province of Kunduz, Al-Jazeera showed Azimy meeting with Taliban fighters and interviewing a Taliban commander who said that he was in charge of hundreds of men and had 12 suicide bombers waiting to strike.
Afghan authorities may have been angered by the report, Al-Jazeera correspondent David Chater said in a statement.
“We don’t know why they’ve been taken. We don’t know what they’ve been charged with, if they’ve been charged at all. We don’t know why they’re being interrogated, if indeed they’re being interrogated,” Chater said.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to