KABUL: Afghan President Hamid Karzai yesterday called on the Taleban and other insurgent groups to vote in landmark August elections and not attack the polls. He also criticized the US ambassador for attending a meeting on the decentralization of power.
At a news conference, Karzai said all eligible Afghans should register for voting cards and cast their ballots in the Aug. 20 presidential and provincial council elections. “It is my wish that our Taleban brothers and all other Afghans who are not in Afghanistan for various reasons and are standing in opposition ... renounce violence not only on the election day but forever,” he said. “It is also my request that they should come to their land, take cards, register and take part in the elections.”
Karzai was referring to insurgents based in Pakistan where many Taleban, including the group’s fugitive leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, are said to have fled after the 2001 US-led invasion that drove the extremists from power.
Karzai is standing for a second term in the elections, the second-ever presidential ballot in a country that has a history of oppressive governments and has been ruined by decades of war. With a Taleban-led insurgency peaking this year, there are concerns that the militants will attack the polls.
Karzai said US Ambassador Karl Eikenberry’s attendance at a press conference this month, where a leading rival to the president in the elections had called for a decentralization of his government, was deeply sensitive and “raises concerns.” This was especially so because of recent US and British media reports of plans laid in “Washington and in London to bring a change into the structure of governance in Afghanistan to weaken the central government,” Karzai said.
“That is of immense sensitivity to the people of Afghanistan and to myself and that is something that we will fight tooth and nail,” the president added.
