Afghan voters will return to the polls next month to choose a successor to outgoing Afghan President Hamid Karzai, whose refusal to sign a deal permitting US troops to stay beyond the end of the year has raised security concerns as the Taliban wages a deadly campaign of bombings and attacks.
The second round of voting was announced yesterday in Kabul and set for June 14. It will likely feature a tight race between two top candidates from the first round: former Afghan minister of foreign affairs Abdullah Abdullah and ex-minister of finance Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai.
Yet that is also cause for concern since the second round will coincide with the height of the Taliban spring offensive launched earlier this week. The insurgency has renewed its campaign of attacks on the Afghan police and military, increasing fears over security when voters head to the polls.
The Taliban have vowed to disrupt the vote with bombings and attacks, although the first round on April 5 was relatively violence-free.
Abdullah garnered 45 percent of votes in the first round, while Ahmadzai came second with 31.6 percent, Independent Election Commission of Afghanisatan chairman Ahmad Yousuf Nouristani said.
Earlier this week, Abdullah picked up a potential election-tipping endorsement in Zalmai Rassoul, a fellow former Afghan minister of foreign affairs who took 11.5 percent in the first round.
Yet it is unclear if Rassoul can deliver the votes of his supporters, who are largely Pashtuns, the country’s largest ethnic group.
International attention is also focused on whether the new president will sign the US security pact. Both Abdullah and Ahmadzai have said they support the deal.
The final results announced by Nouristani were almost exactly the same as the preliminary results released late last month.
More than 7 million Afghans voted in the first round, considered a strong turnout in a poll plagued by Taliban threats and logistical hardships for voters and poll workers.
Jan Kubis, the UN secretary general’s special representative for Afghanistan, commended the candidates for running “a hard-fought, but positive campaign.”
US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan James Dobbins on Tuesday said there is a risk that the cordial tone between candidates in the first round could sharpen in the second round.
“The second round could become a little more negative potentially, it could be more potentially divisive, I’m not predicting this, but it’s something that one worries about a bit,” he said from Tokyo, where he was attending a meeting of the International Contact Group on Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Malaysia yesterday installed a motorcycle-riding billionaire sultan as its new king in lavish ceremonies for a post seen as a ballast in times of political crises. The coronation ceremony for Malaysia’s King Sultan Ibrahim, 65, at the National Palace in Kuala Lumpur followed his oath-taking in January as the country’s 17th monarch. Malaysia is a constitutional monarchy, with a unique arrangement that sees the throne change hands every five years between the rulers of nine Malaysian states headed by centuries-old Islamic royalty. While chiefly ceremonial, the position of king has in the past few years played an increasingly important role. Royal intervention was
X-37B COMPARISON: China’s spaceplane is most likely testing technology, much like US’ vehicle, said Victoria Samson, an official at the Secure World Foundation China’s shadowy, uncrewed reusable spacecraft, which launches atop a rocket booster and lands at a secretive military airfield, is most likely testing technology, but could also be used for manipulating or retrieving satellites, experts said. The spacecraft, on its third mission, was last month observed releasing an object, moving several kilometers away and then maneuvering back to within a few hundred meters of it. “It’s obvious that it has a military application, including, for example, closely inspecting objects of the enemy or disabling them, but it also has non-military applications,” said Marco Langbroek, a lecturer in optical space situational awareness at Delft
The Philippine Air Force must ramp up pilot training if it is to buy 20 or more multirole fighter jets as it modernizes and expands joint operations with its navy, a commander said yesterday. A day earlier US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that the US “will do what is necessary” to see that the Philippines is able to resupply a ship on the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) that Manila uses to reinforce its claims to the atoll. Sullivan said the US would prefer that the Philippines conducts the resupplies of the small crew on the warship Sierra Madre,
AIRLINES RECOVERING: Two-thirds of the flights canceled on Saturday due to the faulty CrowdStrike update that hit 8.5 million devices worldwide occurred in the US As the world continues to recover from massive business and travel disruptions caused by a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, malicious actors are trying to exploit the situation for their own gain. Government cybersecurity agencies across the globe and CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz are warning businesses and individuals around the world about new phishing schemes that involve malicious actors posing as CrowdStrike employees or other tech specialists offering to assist those recovering from the outage. “We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this,” Kurtz said in a statement. “I encourage everyone to remain vigilant