Afghan voters will return to the polls next month to choose a successor to outgoing Afghan President Hamid Karzai, whose refusal to sign a deal permitting US troops to stay beyond the end of the year has raised security concerns as the Taliban wages a deadly campaign of bombings and attacks.
The second round of voting was announced yesterday in Kabul and set for June 14. It will likely feature a tight race between two top candidates from the first round: former Afghan minister of foreign affairs Abdullah Abdullah and ex-minister of finance Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai.
Yet that is also cause for concern since the second round will coincide with the height of the Taliban spring offensive launched earlier this week. The insurgency has renewed its campaign of attacks on the Afghan police and military, increasing fears over security when voters head to the polls.
The Taliban have vowed to disrupt the vote with bombings and attacks, although the first round on April 5 was relatively violence-free.
Abdullah garnered 45 percent of votes in the first round, while Ahmadzai came second with 31.6 percent, Independent Election Commission of Afghanisatan chairman Ahmad Yousuf Nouristani said.
Earlier this week, Abdullah picked up a potential election-tipping endorsement in Zalmai Rassoul, a fellow former Afghan minister of foreign affairs who took 11.5 percent in the first round.
Yet it is unclear if Rassoul can deliver the votes of his supporters, who are largely Pashtuns, the country’s largest ethnic group.
International attention is also focused on whether the new president will sign the US security pact. Both Abdullah and Ahmadzai have said they support the deal.
The final results announced by Nouristani were almost exactly the same as the preliminary results released late last month.
More than 7 million Afghans voted in the first round, considered a strong turnout in a poll plagued by Taliban threats and logistical hardships for voters and poll workers.
Jan Kubis, the UN secretary general’s special representative for Afghanistan, commended the candidates for running “a hard-fought, but positive campaign.”
US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan James Dobbins on Tuesday said there is a risk that the cordial tone between candidates in the first round could sharpen in the second round.
“The second round could become a little more negative potentially, it could be more potentially divisive, I’m not predicting this, but it’s something that one worries about a bit,” he said from Tokyo, where he was attending a meeting of the International Contact Group on Afghanistan and Pakistan.
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS