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.
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