Afghanistan's two rival presidential candidates are due to sign a power-sharing agreement Sunday, a senior government official said, ending a prolonged stand-off over the disputed result of the June 14 election. The final result is also scheduled for release, after being delayed for last-minute talks on the agreement to break a deadlock that has plunged Afghanistan into a political crisis as US-led troops end their 13-year war against the Taliban.
Both Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah claim to have won the fraud-tainted election, and the United Nations has pushed hard for a "national unity government" to avoid a return to the ethnic divisions of the 1990s civil war. "Both candidates are expected to sign an agreement on the structure of National Unity (Government) tomorrow," Aimal Faizi, spokesman for outgoing President Hamid Karzai, said on his Twitter account late Saturday. Ghani - who won the vote according to preliminary results - is set to emerge as president, with Abdullah nominating who will fill the new post of "chief executive officer", possibly taking on the role himself.
Under the Afghan constitution, the president wields almost total control, and the new government structure faces a major test in the coming years as the country's security and economic outlook worsens. The election process has been plagued by delays and setbacks, and the latest timetable could still change if disputes flare up again. "The IEC will officially announce the final result of the presidential election tomorrow," Independent Election Commission spokesman Noor Mohammad Noor told AFP on Saturday. A ruling coalition between the opposing camps is likely to be uneasy after an election that has revived some of the fierce ethnic loyalties of the civil war that led to the Taliban taking power in Kabul. A power-sharing deal would also undermine hopes that Afghanistan could hold a transparent election to cap the multi-billion-dollar international military and aid intervention since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.
President Hamid Karzai, whose successor was originally due to be inaugurated on August 2, was constitutionally barred from standing for a third term in office. He has stayed publicly neutral in the election. About 41,000 Nato troops remain in Afghanistan, down from a peak of 150,000 in 2010, fighting along Afghan soldiers and police against the fierce Taliban insurgency.
Nato's combat mission will end in December, with a follow-on force of about 12,000 troops likely to stay into 2015 on training and support duties. After the June election was engulfed in fraud allegations, the US brokered a deal in which the two candidates agreed to abide by the outcome of an audit of all eight million ballot papers and then form a national unity government. But Abdullah later abandoned the audit, saying it was failing to clean out fraud. Only ten days ago, he insisted he had won fairly and that negotiations over the unity government had collapsed.