Campaigning for Presidency in Afghanistan

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Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, a former Afghan foreign minister, emerged from a crowded field of candidates as the most potent rival to President Hamid Karzai in this year’s presidential election in Afghanistan.

Abdullah — an ophthalmologist by training — campaigned across the country in an effort to win supporters beyond the ethnic Tajik minority of northern Afghanistan, with whom he is most closely identified. Many of the areas he visited in the weeks before the Aug. 20 vote were in the heartland of the insurgency — southern and eastern Afghanistan. Those regions are home to Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group, the Pashtun, President Hamid Karzai’s people. Dr. Abdullah knew he needed to win support among the Pashtuns majority in order to be elected.

Whether his efforts bore fruit remains an open question. Afghan election authorities and U.N.-backed electoral fraud investigators are still sorting through allegations of vote rigging, most of it on behalf of President Karzai.

While no pre-election polls indicated Dr. Abdullah would win the election outright, they did find he could possibly force a second-round runoff against President Karzai.

In the coming days electoral officials are expected to complete their fraud investigations and decide whether there will be a runoff.  No matter what, Western diplomats and observers say Dr. Abdullah’s strong showing has catapulted him into a tier of Afghan politics that was once inhabited only by President Karzai. He’s likely to remain a force in Afghan politics and could become the kind of effective opposition leader needed to keep a deeply corrupt government a little more honest, something Afghanistan has lacked for the past eight years.