After an agonising wait since April, when ballots were cast for the presidency of Afghanistan, we had an answer at last on Sunday which should help our embattled neighbour, in which we have much stake, regain a semblance of balance.
If all goes well here on, the arrangement reached to sort out the election-related confusion should prove to be a step in the direction of bolstering the political situation and the security dynamics in relation to the Taliban and Pakistan, which effectively controls those militants.
What’s interesting is that Afghanistan had a vote in April to elect the country’s President under the existing Constitution. But five months on it emerges that it will have a President and a Prime Minister.
This is on the basis of a United States-promoted understanding between Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai and Abdullah Abdullah, the two high-profile and well regarded Afghans who engaged in a bitter contest for the presidency.
Dr Ashraf Ghani, a pre-eminent intellectual and former World Bank official, has come through as President, and Dr Abdullah, who trained to be an eye doctor, will be Prime Minister, but in the first instance will be called the Chief Executive Officer until the country’s Constitution is formally changed, something like two years from now.
It became necessary to evolve a formula to assuage sentiments in the Abdullah camp, and that formula is to introduce an innovation by way of having a Prime Minister who would be a co-president of sorts under what is now being called a national “unity government”.
Was this the best way out, or the only way? We must wait to find out. But the feared sharpness of ethnic conflict if the Abdullah contingent remained aggrieved with the election outcome alerted the United States and the United Nations to the need to have a major constitutional amendment dovetailed into the election result.
The nomenclature of the government tells its own story. Now Afghanistan’s well wishers will need to persuade the new President and the Chief Executive Officer to stay the course with the “unity government” and not to invite conflict in the choice of personnel or formulation of policy.
That would be in tune with the wishes of the Afghan people who had come out to vote in unprecedented numbers in April in spite of bad weather and Taliban-promoted violence.
India is looked up to in Afghanistan on account of its democracy, and its policy of religious and ethnic harmony. It should seek to maintain its position of a good friend who may be expected to offer wise counsel.
This means India should continue to listen to all sides, as it did in the years of the outgoing President, Hamid Karzai, a friend of this country who held Afghanistan together in the face of daunting odds and difficult times.
