Hamid Karzai, the ethnic Pashtun leader who has led Afghanistan's interim administration for the past six months, was overwhelmingly elected Thursday night by a national assembly to become transitional head of state for the next 18 months to two years.
Karzai, 44, received 1,295 of a possible 1,575 votes cast by members of the assembly, known as a loya jirga. The assembly had been widely expected to elect him after his main potential rival, former Afghan king Mohammed Zahir Shah, repeatedly endorsed Karzai over the past several days.
Two last-minute challengers ?Masooda Jalal, a physician and women's activist; and Mir Mahfooz Nedahi, a scientist and deputy government minister ?won 171 and 89 votes respectively after announcing their candidacies at the loya jirga Thursday morning.
"It is a great honor for me that you, my brothers and sisters, have trusted me to run the government in transition," Karzai told the cheering delegates immediately after the vote was announced. "I am a humble servant of God, and I am at the service of development and Islam for Afghanistan."
During the next several days, the loya jirga delegates must choose the heads of parliament and the supreme court, form a transitional parliament and elect its members. Under a plan mandated by the United Nations, the transitional government must take office by June 22 and serve until elections are held late next year.
An especially sensitive task also awaits Karzai, who must quickly select a cabinet that satisfies all ethnic groups and reduces the power of rival officials in key ministries without undermining their support for his new government.
Karzai was named to head an interim coalition government last December at a U.N. conference in Bonn after the collapse of the Taliban. Foreign observers here, including U.S. officials, had suggested Karzai's continuation in power would be the best guarantee of stability for Afghanistan as it recovers from years of war, civil conflict and religious repression.
Although Karzai had earned praise both at home and abroad for his efforts to unify and rebuild the nation during the past six months, however, it was not clear until now how broad a popular mandate he could muster in a country long riven by bitter ethnic feuds.
But as the loya jirga approached, Karzai increasingly emerged as the most logical candidate. His victory seemed virtually assured earlier this week after Zahir Shah, 87, ended a groundswell of support for his return to power by strongly endorsing Karzai, and key members of the Tajik ethnic group reached a private power-sharing deal for the transitional government.
Today, although some delegates wanted to elect him by voice vote, Karzai and other officials insisted that the ballots be cast in secret to cement his legitimacy in power. The cumbersome process, which was overseen by U.N. monitors, took nearly five hours.
There were reports of a movement within the loya jirga to nominate Zahir Shah, and many delegates expressed resentment at the private deal among high-level officials to make Karzai the only candidate, saying they feared the country's first democratic exercise in years would become irrelevant.
On Wednesday, a Pashtun elder close to the king won 500 votes in the election for loya jirga chairman, placing second. The post was won by Ismael Qasimyar, an independent lawyer who headed the national loya jirga commission that oversaw nationwide local elections for assembly delegates.
But by this morning, Karzai had gathered more than 1,000 nomination signatures among the ethnically and regionally diverse assembly members, far more than the 150 required. Dozens of delegates, including some who had previously favored the king, lined up to make endorsement speeches for Karzai before being cut off for lack of time.
"It's clear that a deal has been made, and everyone wants to be a part of it," said Alex Thier, an American analyst from the non-profit International Crisis Group. "Everyone is running around the loya jirga with blank candidate forms, signing up for parliament and ministry positions."
Qayyum Karzai, an older brother and aide to Hamid Karzai, attributed the rush of support to the nation's yearning for unity and peace after a quarter-century of conflict and political instability, from the Soviet invasion of 1979 to the Islamic militia wars of the early 1990s to the repressive Taliban era that ended last year.
"This nation has grown enormously pragmatic. People know what dangers they face, what can go wrong and how easy it would be to return to the [civil strife] of the early 1990s," he said today. "They want to avoid that by any means possible."
The only significant challenge to Karzai came from Jalal, who gave a lengthy and articulate speech today calling for a modern Islamic society and outlining an array of problems to be solved, from drug trafficking to ethnic mistrust to repression of women.
But she presented no serious challenge to Karzai, whose own speech to the assembly after being formally nominated was a sober, diplomatic tour d'horizon that seemed more like a post-election address to mend fences at home and abroad.
Karzai said his top priorities were to bring peace, security and unity to the country and then to help bring economic development that would end the "slavery of neediness." He said he was glad to see hundreds of thousands of refugees returning from abroad and "especially happy that after 25 years, Afghanistan is again becoming a homeland."
He also paid homage to Afghanistan's Islamic traditions and reached out to various religious factions, saying some Taliban figures had been "my friends" and thanking various former Islamic militia leaders for supporting him. The presence of such men in the loya jirga has been controversial, but Karzai's strategy has been to bring them into the modern political process.
In various speeches during the past several days, Karzai has also paid glowing tribute to Zahir Shah, who returned from exile in April, proposing that he be officially named "Father of the Nation" and be given a number of ceremonial duties.
Karzai, a Pashtun tribal aristocrat and former deputy foreign minister, spent the Taliban years in exile in Pakistan, where he was the center of a pro-democracy movement and worked closely with Zahir Shah's aides in Rome, where the former king lived in exile, trying to broker peace negotiations between the Taliban and the Tajik-led opposition forces known as the Northern Alliance.
Last October, when U.S.-led coalition forces joined with the Northern Alliance in trying to forcibly topple the Taliban, Karzai snuck into southern Afghanistan to try to woo local tribes to the opposition. There were widespread but conflicting reports that he was captured by hostile tribesmen and then rescued with assistance from U.S. intelligence agencies.
After the Taliban defeat, Karzai was one of the most prominent figures at the U.N. conference in Bonn, where various groups, including Pashtun and Northern Alliance leaders, reached an uneasy agreement to set up a temporary coalition government that would be headed by Karzai and protected by a multinational military force.
Initially, Karzai was seen as a weak leader with no armed supporters in a country long ruled by armed militias. But as the months passed, he earned the grudging respect of his Northern Alliance partners, and he traveled abroad repeatedly in an effort to bring in foreign assistance to his impoverished, war-wracked nation.
On Friday, Karzai is expected to hold a news conference that will lay out some of his immediate plans and long-term policies, while the loya jirga will continue its work through the weekend.
(China Daily June 13, 2002)
