Tolo News – Council Presidential Candidates Calls Annul Election Result
02/21/20 – The Ghani regime and their World Bank backers in league with Clintonista and Globalist diplomats have badly over reached and thrown Afghanistan into crisis by rigging yet another election. To everyone’s disgust, the IEC (International Election Commission) has sanctioned the results. After 5 months of waiting, Afghans have been told that Ashraf Ghani has won the elections. Most Afghans are balking. It can be seen as an indication of how seriously Globalists take the Doha talks with the Taliban. The questionable election result also throws into ever more question the viability of Intra Afghan talks that are supposed to take place after some form of American withdrawal. The talks, which are being sold as “peace talks” between US officials and the Taliban began as prisoner swaps. But there is some question as to whether the Taliban ever intended to leverage anything more than the release of prisoners through the Doha process. Complicating the perception that the US is actually negotiating with the Taliban is the fact that the lead negotiator for the US, Zalmay Khalilzad, constantly shuttles to Pakistani GHQ to have meetings. The prisoner swaps are still an issue with the Taliban claiming that they are holding some 1000 Kabul regime troops which they will trade for 5000 Taliban troops held by Kabul. A sticking point for an Intra Afghan negotiation is whether or not the prisoner swap takes place before the talks. Kabul is refusing to make a swap before talks as arranged by US negotiators.
The IEC (International Election Committee) that sanctioned the Ghani victory basically fled from Afghanistan before they could be held to account for such an obvious electoral fraud. Dr. Abdullah Abdullah who was a candidate and shared power with Ghani as a result of the previous rigged election called for the Interior Ministry to detain the IEC officials before they boarded a plane to leave Afghanistan. In a surprise move, the current head of the Interior ministry refused. A group of other electoral candidates have met and are threatening to form an alternative government. Ghani is well known to be without any local constituency in spite of claims made by western press organs. The other presidential candidates all have more credibility with the Taliban as they actually do have separate real constituencies. In such a scenario, the question arises, what will the response from Islamabad be if the Kabul government breaks up?
The only saving grace may be the total failure of the US – Afghan “talks”. The US negotiating position has two sticking points that the Taliban will never agree to. The first is to secure some kind of agreement for the rights of women to be written into the next Afghan constitution. The Taliban will never agree to that (although they may pay some lip service to it). The second issue is the insistence by the US to keep some US counter terror presence in Afghanistan. The Taliban will never agree to this. At jezail.org, it believed that these two negotiating positions are designed to be poison pill tactics to prolong the war for those people who profit from the war.
Jezail.org also believes that the tactic is also meant to buy time for the Kabul electoral crisis to wind down or blow over. It will not. Unlike Mr. Ghani, the people who feel most cheated came up as combat hardened leaders who fought the Soviets. Unlike Mr. Ghani, most have militias or armed government troops behind them. There is a significant chance that this crisis will explode into violence among the Kabul regime leadership. In as much as Mr. Ghani has no real constituency to defend him, he might have been wiser to get on the plane with the IEC officials. The same might be said for some 13,000 US personnel still in Afghanistan. With ever increasing clarity, jezail.org foresees a possible repeat of the 1842 massacre of the Elphinstone retreat.
Standing behind Mr. Ghani is the former head of the Afghan Interior Ministry (NDS), Amrullah Saleh. A highly competent man, Saleh has been a staunch fighter against the Taliban and Pakistan. He came up from similar political and guerilla roots as Dr. Abdullah Abdullah from the days of the Soviet occupation. However, he has strived to cut his own path and built his own political movement, called the “Green Trend”. It is rumored that he was offered the Afghan presidency by Western diplomats and that he refused. It is believed that he is aware of the fact that Afghanistan has not historically been kind to leaders who cooperate with the West. Whatever happens in the coming weeks, he will be a major player. Under any circumstances, it is highly unlikely that he will get on a plane to flee Afghanistan. Ghani might but Saleh wont.
The ethnic demography of Afghanistan is likely to become more important again because of this crisis. Afghanistan has always been dogged by its’ own deadly form of identity politics. They struggled to unify to defeat the Soviets. The dominant ethnic group is the Pashtun tribe which make up an estimated 40% of Afghans with more living in Pakistan. They have traditionally ruled the country. It was a rule that was beginning to be challenged in the days before the Soviet invasion and arguably triggered it. Afghanistan’s civil wars have been fought between the Pashtun and the other 60% of the Afghan population which is made up of a patchwork of other ethnic groups. The other ethnic groups have struggled to maintain unity against the Pashtuns to reach a more broad based government. After the Soviet defeat, the Pashtuns split away from the troubled alliance of the Mujahedin and, with some money and goading by an American diplomat, they began to organize as a Pashtun chauvinist army under an obscure cleric, Mullah Omar. Tempted by Western money, Pakistani military aid and vowing to end “corruption”, they attacked the newly installed Mujahedin government which they are often mistaken for. In fact, the Mujahedin who fought the Soviets and the Taliban who didn’t exist until after the Soviets left have fought a long bloody civil war against each other for years. That difference is the heart of the struggle that will continue long after the US finally leaves Afghanistan. It may well end in genocide.
This discord is further complicated by the fact that the Pashtuns, under the banner of the Taliban, are financially, logistically and militarily supported by Pakistan. Pakistan’s goals in Afghanistan are claimed to be defensive against Indian regional military competition. This is a cover story. Pakistan has aspirations to annex and loot as much of Afghanistan as it can. The same can be said of other countries on Afghanistan’s borders. But Pakistan’s appetites and ambitions are clearly the largest. They have been issuing Pakistani ID cards to Afghans living in provinces next to the Pakistani border. They have set up schools in Afghanistan to teach Afghan school children the Pakistani language, Urdu. They use the Taliban and allied Pashtun factions as a proxy force. They also envision Afghanistan as a home for their multifaceted terrorist operations. However, it is not at all clear that the Taliban will tolerate that again as they once did.
So it is in the ebbs and flows of these struggles and quicksand dynamics that the same people who rigged the first 2 Afghan national elections chose to do it again. It was a fix that had to be known by every intelligence service, diplomatic corps and NGO in the region. Claiming to not know about the first two fixes was a stretch. Claiming to not know about it a third time is an insult. This is the kind of vision that globalism inflicts on the world. American foreign policy leadership has stubbornly fixed US power and dwindling prestige in the middle of all of this. It is a position that is clearly untenable.
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