Ashraf Ghani to seek re-election in 2019
kabul — Afghan President Ashraf Ghani will seek re-election in 2019, his office announced on Saturday, as potential rivals begin jockeying for the country’s top job ahead of the ballot.
Ghani, who was elected in a fraud-tainted poll in 2014 that was only resolved in a US-brokered power-sharing deal, is expected to present himself to war-weary voters as the candidate who can end the 17-year conflict.
The 69-year-old acerbic academic, who has a reputation for shouting at subordinates and micromanaging the unity government, will try to capitalise on renewed US-led efforts to engage the Taleban in peace talks, which are
showing tentative signs of bearing fruit.
“I can confirm that President Ghani is seeking re-election next year,” presidential palace spokesman Shah Hussain Murtazawi told
AFP. Ghani, who chose the widely feared ethnic Uzbek leader Abdul Rashid Dostum as his first running mate in the 2014 election, has not yet announced who he will pick this time round. — kabul — One US soldier was killed and another wounded in an “apparent insider attack” in Kabul on Saturday, Nato said, in the latest such assault on international forces in Afghanistan.
There was no claim of responsibility for the third so-called “green-on-blue” attack in less than three weeks.
The Taleban claimed two similar attacks in the western province of Herat on October 22 and the southern province of Kandahar on October 18.
General Scott Miller, the top Nato and US commander in Afghanistan, narrowly escaped the latter attack that killed a powerful police chief. —