Afghanistan’s presidential candidates

KABUL, Afghanistan — Whether wrapped in a shawl for a televised debate, sitting on a dirt floor with a shopkeeper, or thundering over speakers in a dust storm, Ashraf Ghani, the most educated and Westernized of Afghanistan’s presidential candidates, is shaking up the campaign before Thursday’s election in unusual ways.
A former finance minister with a background in American academia and at the World Bank, Mr. Ghani, 60, says he is trying to change politics in Afghanistan. Using television and radio, Internet donations and student volunteers, as well as traditional networks like religious councils, he is seeking to reach out to young people, women and the poor, and do the unexpected: defeat President Hamid Karzai.
Mr. Ghani’s national support is hard to gauge — one recent poll put it at just 4 percent — and he probably remains an outsider in the race, trailing Mr. Karzai and his main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, both of whom have much larger power bases.
Yet Mr. Ghani is elevating the debate with a focus on policy and a detailed plan for reform, challenging the Afghan electorate to think beyond the status quo.
“The people, the nature of mobilization, the talk has changed, anyplace I go,” he said in an early morning interview at his home in Kabul before setting off by helicopter to campaign in the provinces. “Afghans have a very different expectation of leadership today than they have ever had.”
A two-hour live television and radio debate between Mr. Ghani and Mr. Abdullah on July 23, watched and heard by over 10 million people, has created a huge change in thinking, Mr. Ghani said. Mr. Karzai declined to participate, something his two opponents have used against him.
Since the debate, a flow of student volunteers has come forward to work for his campaign, Mr. Ghani said, and people from all walks — pilots, merchants, professors — have engaged him in detailed discussion of his ideas.
Articulate in several languages, Mr. Ghani has written two books, one titled “Fixing Failed States,” and the other a detailed plan on how to lift Afghanistan out of poverty and instability within 10 years, which is essentially his election manifesto.
Mr. Ghani has been one of the most influential figures involved in building the current Afghan state. Appointed finance minister in 2002, he instituted a centralized revenue collection scheme, and oversaw the flow of billions of dollars of foreign assistance into the war-torn country.
Yet his scrupulousness made him enemies and, disillusioned with official corruption and Mr. Karzai’s leadership, he left the cabinet in 2004.
Such is his experience, and his support in Washington, that Mr. Ghani is among the contenders mentioned to fill a strong executive position under the president that is being proposed by American officials to strengthen the government’s performance should Mr. Karzai win another term.
Mr. Ghani, whose campaign has hired the political strategist James Carville as a consultant, says it is too early to discuss post-election scenarios. He was once a close adviser to the president, but his distaste for Mr. Karzai’s way of running things is deep-seated, and he has been an outspoken critic of the way politics have been conducted in Afghanistan.
He has been the most vociferous of any candidate in challenging Mr. Karzai’s overstaying his constitutional mandate, which was extended in order to hold the election on Aug. 20, and also in accusing the president of using government resources and officials to promote his campaign. And he has castigated the election organizers, both foreign and Afghan, for allowing fraud and manipulation to occur unchecked.
He has also rejected the backroom deal-making for which Mr. Karzai has been strongly criticized, and has refused overtures from Mr. Karzai to give up his candidacy and join his campaign, something a number of other prospective candidates have done.
At election rallies, he vows to curb government corruption and so find the revenue to create a million jobs and a million houses.
He promises better education for the young, by increasing the number of mosques and madrasas to provide a general education at the village level. He also proposes adding universities and women’s colleges, as there are thousands more students than universities can accommodate.
And he lays out how to develop Afghanistan’s natural resources and create economic growth with Afghan labor, and bring justice and peace through local structures.