KABUL, Afghanistan — Three months after Afghanistan’s presidential vote, the entire electoral process is stalled in a dispute that Afghan and Western officials say could pose an even greater threat to stability than the last such crisis, five years ago. Supporters of opposition candidates have besieged half a dozen election offices around the country for weeks, vowing to fight rather than accept another U.S.-brokered compromise like the one that resolved the 2014 dispute. And election officials say a biometric verification process that was supposed to prevent voter fraud may have been compromised by human error. In the middle of it all — again — is Abdullah Abdullah, making his third attempt to become president, and for the third time falling into a bitter standoff with election officials. Then, Secretary of State John Kerry negotiated a power-sharing deal between Mr. Abdullah, now Afghanistan’s chief executive, and Ashraf Ghani, now the president, that Mr. Kerry said had averted a civil war.

Source: International New York Times December 12, 2019 05:03 UTC