KABUL, 26 August 2004 — Yunus Qanuni, President Hamid Karzai’s former ally turned chief rival in landmark October elections, has accused Karzai of failing to combat drugs, disarm militias and live up to Afghans’ expectations. In an interview with AFP two weeks before the official campaign period opens, the former education minister who stepped down last month to run against Karzai for president said the two-year-old interim government had failed to tackle the war-ravaged country’s biggest problems.
“Security in Afghanistan has deteriorated day by day, narcotics ... have risen 18 times compared to last year, the weapons ... were not collected, and reconstruction of Afghanistan, despite international support, failed to take place,” he said.
Qanuni, a senior member of the Northern Alliance group of commanders who helped the United States topple the hard-line Taleban regime in 2001, served as Karzai’s education minister and also as interior minister before quitting the Cabinet to run against him in the October polls.
Part of the powerful clique of ethnic Tajik commanders from the Panjsher Valley which dominates the Cabinet, Qanuni had been in talks with Karzai in recent weeks over whether to back him in the polls in return for a senior post in the post-election administration, according to his close aides.
But Tuesday, he ruled out pulling out of the race to strike a deal with Karzai. “My candidacy is not to obtain positions, it is to save Afghanistan, to build a government of the future of Afghanistan. So no post and position can stop me from my determination,” Qanuni told AFP.
Fellow Panjsheri Tajiks including powerful Defense Minister Mohammad Qasim Fahim have thrown their weight behind Qanuni’s candidacy. Qanuni accused elements in Karzai’s government of sparking a factional clash in western Herat province earlier this month in a bid to secure control of drug-trafficking routes to Iran.
“The Herat fighting was organized by some high-ranking government officials. There are some officials in the government who are aiming to connect drugs-trafficking routes ... to Afghanistan’s borders.
“One of the aims for enflaming this fighting was to link drug-trafficking routes,” he claimed. Clashes erupted between western strongman Ismail Khan, who governs Herat, and a rival warlord on Aug. 14. Fighting raged for four days, leaving scores of militiamen dead, until Afghanistan’s fledgling army and US-led coalition forces stepped in to broker a truce.
Qanuni rejected assumptions that Washington had a preferred candidate in the upcoming vote. “The United States has a wider strategy in the region and would never invest in a single person,” he said, responding to perceptions of Karzai as US-backed. “America doesn’t have a candidate — America’s candidate will be the candidate of Afghanistan’s people whomever the people of Afghanistan support.” However, he warned that if the US were to throw its weight behind one individual, “it would be America’s historic mistake.” Qanuni said he was among a group of rival candidates who had asked Karzai to step down ahead of elections.
He said some candidates were still considering boycotting the vote if Karzai declined, but he did not make clear whether he supported the boycott idea. “There was a joint meeting with candidates last week, everyone took the decision to ask Mr. Karzai to resign, to prevent him misusing the government properties and officials, and I was among them,” he said. Rival candidates hoped “that the first democracy experience will emerge clear, clean of fraud, clean of conspiracy, and clean of any deception.”
“If we can’t prevent fraud in the elections, the best way to prevent the killing of democracy in Afghanistan would be to boycott the elections.”
Qanuni is a religious conservative who is seen as the No. 1 rival to Karzai because of his support in key regions of northern Afghanistan and his ability to speak the southern Pushtu language. Afghanistan goes to the polls for its historic first presidential election Oct. 9. Karzai faces 17 challengers including Qanuni.
Reuters adds:
Hundreds of suspected militants held by US-led forces in Afghanistan since the overthrow of the Taleban in late 2001 will be tried in Afghan courts under local laws, a US Army spokesman said yesterday. Maj. Scott Nelson said Karzai and Lt. Gen. David Barno, the overall commander of US-led troops in Afghanistan, agreed the plan earlier this month.
“The people that are still being held here will be tried in Afghan courts and under the Afghan justice system,” Nelson told a regular press briefing. He said the detainees posed no major threat and the reason why the US military was holding them for a longer time was because Afghanistan lacked prisons and its judicial system was being rebuilt.
Hundreds of suspected militants, of many nationalities, have been caught by the US military since then and are being kept at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and in its detention centers in Afghanistan. Former prisoners released from US jails in Afghanistan say they were tortured and abused while in custody, raising concerns that scandal over the mistreatment of prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison earlier this year was not an isolated episode. Nelson said a report on a US military investigation into alleged abuse of prisoners in Afghanistan would be released “very, very soon”.
