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Choosing the Afghan cabinet is to government what the national sport of buzkashi is to polo: a wild and woolly version with uniquely local characteristics and notably more carnage.
President Ashraf Ghani’s presentation of new cabinet nominees to Parliament on Tuesday was a case in point. One proposed nominee had just pulled out after revelations of an Interpol warrant for his arrest. Another dropped out, complaining that he did not have enough money and jobs to bribe Parliament into approving him. A third was subject to a social media smear campaign alleging that she had just gotten a new identity card so she could add a few years to her age to qualify for the job.
Several other would-be ministers were reportedly headed to the exits before Parliament got a chance to vote on them, as revelations tumbled out about dual citizenships, frowned on by the Afghan Constitution, or even, in one case, allegedly not being fluent in any national language.
“The candidate for rural development studied urban development, and the candidate for urban development studied rural development,” said Ramazan Bashardost, an anticorruption crusader and member of Parliament, famous for his outspokenness. “It is another buzkashi game for the presidential palace.”
It did not help the appearance of disarray that the formation of the cabinet had already been more than three months in the making, held up as Mr. Ghani and his chief executive and political rival, Abdullah Abdullah, hashed out a compromise that would balance the cabinet among competing ethnic and political interests.
All of this might be comical if it were not also potentially tragic. In the view of Ahmad Nader Nadery, head of the Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit, the cabinet proposed by Mr. Ghani and Mr. Abdullah is in some ways one of the best the country has ever seen — if it survives the parliamentary process and the wave of revelations about the qualifications of candidates.
Not only is it generally younger and better qualified than past bodies, but the many new faces are a welcome change from the revolving cast of former warlords, jihadist commanders and old-guard figures who have dominated previous Afghan governments, Mr. Nadery said.
In addition, both Mr. Abdullah and Mr. Ghani agreed on a government in defiance of many of the hard-liners who had supported them during the election. “There isn’t a single old face in the proposed cabinet,” Mr. Nadery said. “They pushed aside those big players who have been in every government we’ve had. This is payback.”
In theory, the new 25-member cabinet, plus the head of the central bank and the intelligence service, was meant to be split equally between the two camps, and it was expected to strike a balance among the country’s four major ethnic groups.
Backers of both candidates have cried foul, however, some complaining about ethnic or regional imbalances, others about political disloyalty.
Many of those doing the complaining were clearly behind the payback revelations about the qualifications of the would-be ministers — some of them uncomfortably on the mark.
Links to the website of Interpol were emailed around, referencing a red notice that said the proposed minister for agriculture, Yaqub Haidari, was wanted for large-scale tax evasion and fraudulent conversion in, of all places, Estonia. Mr. Haidari could not be reached for comment, but his aides have said he claims the charges are for activities of a company to which he is no longer connected.
Nonetheless, Mr. Haidari’s name was withdrawn from the cabinet list. As a member of Interpol, Afghanistan would be expected to arrest anyone subject to an Interpol red notice.
A more prominent nominee, Jilani Popal, a well-regarded former government official, withdrew his name from nomination as finance minister. While he is believed to have dual United States and Afghan citizenship, Mr. Popal told friends that he had pulled out when members of Parliament asked him for a total of 400 jobs in exchange for their votes, most of them in the lucrative customs service, leaving him with no slots for unstained candidates.
“He said he decided to withdraw his nomination because of the M.P.s’ demands,” said a friend and former Afghan diplomat, Ahmad Saeedi. “He said he couldn’t do that for them.” Mr. Popal could not be reached for comment.
Posts soon began appearing on various forms of social media, including Facebook and Twitter, purporting to show the old identity documents of Khatera Afghan, the nominee to be minister of higher education, alongside her purported new identity documents, issued only a couple weeks ago.
The documents suggested that Ms. Afghan’s age had suddenly gone up to 38 from the original 32. Ms. Afghan could not be reached for comment, and there was no way to verify the authenticity of the documents. Her picturedoes perhaps suggest someone on the younger side of 35, the minimum age for cabinet members.
The old guard did a lot more than dish dirt on the newcomers.
Ismail Khan, the warlord who has long ruled the western city of Herat and was an important Abdullah supporter in the elections, denounced the lack of ministers from western Afghanistan and said Mr. Abdullah had “disrespected his voters.” Similarly, a warlord and member of Parliament, Hajji Zahir Qadir, who had supported Mr. Ghani, accused the president of abandoning him and his followers after winning election, and campaigned against the cabinet.
In the northern Panjshir Valley, Tajik followers of Mr. Abdullah held a demonstration last weekend to protest the lack of Panjshiris in the proposed cabinet.
Previously, the Panjshiris, whose assassinated resistance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud is deeply revered, have always had at least one of the three most important security ministries, and other northerners have typically had one of the others.
This time, Mr. Abdullah, himself identified with the Panjshir Valley and the north, agreed to a cabinet in which the three top security jobs were delegated to Pashtuns. While the most numerous of Afghanistan’s ethnic groups, the Pashtuns are viewed warily by northerners because the Taliban are mostly Pashtun.
Gen. Sher Mohammad Karimi, now the army chief, is expected to become head of the ministry of defense, while a former communist general, Nur ul-Haq Ulumi, is the proposed choice for the ministry of the interior.Rahmatullah Nabil would lead the National Directorate of Security, the intelligence service. All are Pashtuns.
All of them still have to be approved by an increasingly hostile Parliament. President Ghani fired all of the country’s previous cabinet ministers on Nov. 30 rather than keep them on indefinitely. That old guard has many friends in Parliament, and ratification of the proposed cabinet is far from assured.
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