US secretary of state John Kerry on Saturday held a second day of talks with Afghanistan’s feuding presidential hopefuls, seeking a deal to “clean up the tally” after disputed elections.
Despite back-to-back meetings on Friday with rivals Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani and other officials that stretched deep into the night, US officials said an accord was not yet on the table. The deadlock over last month’s run-off vote to succeed outgoing President Hamid Karzai has plunged Afghanistan into crisis and dented US hopes of a smooth transfer of power as Washington seeks to withdraw all its troops by late 2016.
On a day of intense diplomacy on Saturday, Kerry met Abdullah for about an hour and 20 minutes before holding talks with Ghani and meeting Karzai. Under a proposal put forward by the United Nations, the country’s election commission would audit ballot boxes from just over 8,000 polling stations where suspicions of ballot-stuffing have been raised.
While Ghani’s campaign has embraced the UN plan, Abdullah’s team remains sceptical, arguing the proposal to review some 44 per cent of all votes cast fails to address all their concerns. On Friday Kerry stressed that results released on Monday showing Ghani in the lead with some 56 per cent of the vote were only “preliminary”.