Afghanistan's landmark national elections will be delayed until September to give the UN more time to organize the violence-threatened vote, President Hamid Karzai said yesterday.
"We are ready to manage both elections -- for the parliament and presidency -- in September," Karzai told reporters at his palace in the Afghan capital.
Officials had warned repeatedly that the country's first post-Taliban elections, originally slated for June, would be delayed because of logistical problems and security fears.
So far, only 1.5 million of an estimated 10.5 million eligible voters have been registered for the elections, and it remains unclear how the UN intends to carry out a plan to register most of the others in May.
The Afghan government said on Saturday it will disarm 40,000 irregular Afghan militia soldiers and round up heavy weapons around the country in time for the vote to reduce the risk of voter intimidation.
But the world body, the US-led military coalition and the Afghan government are still working on plans to protect election workers from Taliban-led militants plaguing the south and east.
The top UN special representative in Afghanistan, Jean Arnault, welcomed the delay, saying it would allow time also for NATO to expand its peacekeeping operations beyond Kabul before the vote.
He also called on the Afghan government to guarantee a level playing field for challengers to Karzai and a rash of new political parties.
"Free and fair is not a given," Arnault said. "Many things that haven't happened in the past few years have to happen."
Meanwhile, a Taliban spokesman said the delay until September was "a humiliation and defeat" for Karzai and his American backers and claimed the elections would be fixed.
"They want to divert the attention of Afghans from the importance of jihad," or holy war, Hamid Agha said in a telephone call from an undisclosed location.
More than 200 people have died this year in violence around the country, including aid workers and government employees, as well as militants and foreign and Afghan soldiers.
Five foreign UN staffers helping prepare for the elections were attacked on March 14 with rocket-propelled grenades.
AGING: As of last month, people aged 65 or older accounted for 20.06 percent of the total population and the number of couples who got married fell by 18,685 from 2024 Taiwan has surpassed South Korea as the country least willing to have children, with an annual crude birthrate of 4.62 per 1,000 people, Ministry of the Interior data showed yesterday. The nation was previously ranked the second-lowest country in terms of total fertility rate, or the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime. However, South Korea’s fertility rate began to recover from 2023, with total fertility rate rising from 0.72 and estimated to reach 0.82 to 0.85 by last year, and the crude birthrate projected at 6.7 per 1,000 people. Japan’s crude birthrate was projected to fall below six,
US President Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times published on Thursday said that “it’s up to” Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be “very unhappy” with a change in the “status quo.” “He [Xi] considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing, but I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that. I hope he doesn’t do that,” Trump said. Trump made the comments in the context
SELF-DEFENSE: Tokyo has accelerated its spending goal and its defense minister said the nation needs to discuss whether it should develop nuclear-powered submarines China is ramping up objections to what it sees as Japan’s desire to acquire nuclear weapons, despite Tokyo’s longstanding renunciation of such arms, deepening another fissure in the two neighbors’ increasingly tense ties. In what appears to be a concerted effort, China’s foreign and defense ministries issued statements on Thursday condemning alleged remilitarism efforts by Tokyo. The remarks came as two of the country’s top think tanks jointly issued a 29-page report framing actions by “right-wing forces” in Japan as posing a “serious threat” to world peace. While that report did not define “right-wing forces,” the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs was
PREPAREDNESS: Given the difficulty of importing ammunition during wartime, the Ministry of National Defense said it would prioritize ‘coproduction’ partnerships A newly formed unit of the Marine Corps tasked with land-based security operations has recently replaced its aging, domestically produced rifles with more advanced, US-made M4A1 rifles, a source said yesterday. The unnamed source familiar with the matter said the First Security Battalion of the Marine Corps’ Air Defense and Base Guard Group has replaced its older T65K2 rifles, which have been in service since the late 1980s, with the newly received M4A1s. The source did not say exactly when the upgrade took place or how many M4A1s were issued to the battalion. The confirmation came after Chinese-language media reported
RSS