President Hamid Karzai said yesterday that a marathon constitutional council has overcome the chaos of an ugly boycott and is close to agreement on a draft installing the strong central government he is seeking.
Karzai declined to forecast when the constitution might finally be ratified.
But council spokeswoman Safia Saddiqi issued a ringing warning to the delegates, telling them that yesterday's session should be decisive.
"Don't let enemies celebrate the failure of this jirga. You have been elected by the people and hold the destiny of the country in your hands," she said. "I think in any case that today will be the last day."
But rebel delegates were holding out against a clause that allows dual citizenship for top officials -- an apparent shot at liberal ministers who have returned from exile in the US to take up key Cabinet posts, but have been unwilling to give up coveted American and European passports.
Some 500 members of a grand council, or Loya Jirga, have spent three draining weeks arguing over a new constitution that is supposed to lay the foundations for stability and reconstruction after more than 20 years of fighting.
The debate has exposed fault-lines between modernizers and Islamic conservatives and along the raw ethnic divisions left by the country's recent civil war.
Karzai had insisted that the constitution could be ratified even with a narrow majority. But with the powerful presidency he wants apparently secured, he adopted a more conciliatory tone yesterday.
"Lots of solutions have been found for the problems and there are one or two other matters that are going to be worked on this morning," he told reporters outside his palace in Kabul. "It is important to have a constitution that comes with near consensus if not total consensus."
In the huge jirga tent erected on a Kabul college campus, delegates milled around frustrated at the slow progress.
Mohammed Gul Yunisi, a prominent critic of the US-backed government's plans, said the citizenship issue was the last remaining stumbling block and accused ministers unwilling to give up their foreign passport of lacking patriotism.
"We say keep your Afghan passport and drop your foreign one," he told The Associated Press. "This is betrayal."
Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani, a former World Bank official, and Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali, once a Voice of America reporter, both spent many years in the US and are believed to still hold American passports.
Neither could be reached for comment yesterday.
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