Abdullah’s camp says new four-member committee from the two camps has been set up to find common ground on role of a chief executive to share powers with president
Afghanistan’s rival presidential campaigns were holding last-ditch talks on Wednesday to rescue a deal on a national government after a disputed election raised fears of exacerbating ethnic divisions.
Presidential contender Abdullah Abdullah extended a Tuesday deadline to disengage from the political process to allow international efforts to salvage the US-brokered deal under which the two sides also agreed to accept the results of a UN-supervised vote audit, his camp said.
Abdullah, a former foreign minister who draws most of his support from the minority Tajiks and Hazara communities centered largely in the north and the center, is locked in a feud with rival candidate Ashraf Ghani, a member of Afghanistan’s biggest ethnic group, the Pashtuns.
Abdullah, who was a runner-up in the runoff election results on June 14, has already withdrawn from the vote audit saying it was not being done strictly enough to weed out tens of thousands of fraudulent vote.
On Monday, his running mate, Mohammad Mohaqeq, said that talks with the Ghani campaign on a power-sharing deal for a unity government had also failed with no agreement on the powers of a newly created chief executive.
But on Wednesday, the Abdullah camp said the United States had launched a new effort to rescue the accord brokered by Secretary of State John Kerry to give the losing side a share of power and stop Afghanistan from a return to the sort of ethnic animosity seen during a civil war in the 1990s.
“Talks are underway, we are optimistic,” said Mahmoud Saiqal, a top aide to Abdullah. A new four-member committee from the two camps has been set up to find common ground on the role of a chief executive to share powers with the president.
Abdullah and Ghani, a former finance minister, also met President Hamid Karzai who has been pushing for an early transition to a successor in what will be Afghanistan’s first democratic transfer of power, Mujib Rahimi, a spokesman for Abdullah said.
The moves came after the Abdullah campaign said it would pull out of the process if its demands were not met by Tuesday and a powerful northern ally, Atta Mohammad Noor, threatened to launch mass protests which he called a “green and orange” movement.
His spokesman Munir Farhad said green denoted peaceful street protests that would culminate in taking over government buildings in a parallel to the orange revolution in Ukraine.
