“Look, it’s really him!” a young woman, swathed in a black scarf, whispered to her seatmate as President Hamid Karzai took to the stage to address the crowd.
Until late last week, Karzai had stayed almost entirely out of the public eye, leaving the campaigning to aides and surrogates. But since the campaign began six weeks ago, the race has tightened. Most analysts still believe that Karzai will receive the largest share of votes when Afghans go to the polls on August 20. But unless he can garner more than 50 per cent, the race will go to a runoff.
Karzai’s two main competitors, former Cabinet ministers who broke with their onetime boss, have crisscrossed the country in search of votes. Both rivals, Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani, have been hammering away at the theme that it’s time for a change, a message that resonates with a public disillusioned by the painfully slow pace of reconstruction since the US invasion and angry about a pervasive culture of corruption.
Even as the campaign has heated up, the Afghan president has been a strangely reclusive figure. On Friday, Karzai made his first appearance at a campaign rally in the capital.
“A month or six weeks ago, I would have said no,” said John Dempsey, an elections specialist in Kabul with the US Institute of Peace, referring to the chances of a runoff. “But lately, there have been some indications that opposition will coalesce behind a couple of leading candidates. ... We might see a serious race.”
Because there has been no credible nationwide polling since the start of the campaign last month, the likelihood of that is difficult to gauge.
“There just aren’t any numbers,” said political strategist James Carville, who is advising the Ghani campaign, sounding entirely cheerful about the prospect of flying blind.
“There’s no polling, no focus groups,” Carville, who shot to prominence as the chief strategist of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential bid, said in a telephone interview from the United States. “It’s kind of refreshing.”
Both rivals insist the tide is turning. Abdullah, trained as an ophthalmologist, is best known outside the country as the face and voice of the Northern Alliance, which joined forces with the US to help dislodge the Taliban.
Many Afghans regard the movement’s leader, Ahmed Shah Massood, assassinated two days before 9/11, as a martyr, and Abdullah has taken up his mantle. Massood’s portraits adorn campaign buses and podiums, and his name is invoked in nearly every speech Abdullah gives. In daily appearances, Abdullah, attired in a fashion-forward version of traditional Afghan dress, has been attracting larger and larger crowds.
In Afghan politics, ethnicity is destiny. Karzai draws much of his support from Pashtuns, the largest ethnic group. Abdullah is the son of a Pashtun father and a Tajik mother. But his political identity bears the Tajik stamp, and he has struggled to make headway among Pashtuns.
Abdullah’s most consistent theme is that Karzai has failed in his stewardship of the country. “Don’t choose the wrong person,” he told an enthusiastic audience at Kabul University. “Don’t bring back a government that didn’t do as it promised.”
None of the three leading contenders has called for the expulsion of Western troops. Each expresses hope that Afghanistan one day can safeguard its own territory.
Ghani, a former World Bank development specialist who was once touted as a possible candidate to become UN secretary-general, looks and sounds every inch the urbane international technocrat. During a recent interview, he was dressed in a business suit, his English as perfect as the roses in the garden outside his reception-room window. When he outlined his 10-year action plan — economic development, women’s rights, alleviating poverty — it was not so much a campaign pitch as a polished seminar presentation, perhaps unsurprising for a former professor. But scarcely an hour later, Ghani was dressed in tunic and loose trousers, addressing a gathering of tribal chieftains. “I am a product of both worlds,” said Ghani, who spent 24 years in exile before returning to Afghanistan in 2001 after the fall of the Taliban.
“Yes, I have lived in the West, but I have also lived in the villages. I remember the ritual of receiving nomads at my grandfather’s house, the respect with which they were treated,” he said.
He dismisses the polls showing him with only a tiny share of voter support. “The population considers me a serious contender,” he said. “That is what matters.”
© Los Angeles Times