Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has apparently yielded to pressure from Washington and offered to share some power with his rival, Abdullah Abdullah, a former president who claims to have won last year’s election. Numerous reports say that according to a draft compromise, there will be no power-sharing between Ghani and Abdullah themselves, although the latter will oversee peace talks and some of his colleagues will fill top-level cabinet posts. The US pressure apparently stemmed from an agreement that Washington signed with the Taliban earlier this year aimed at reducing violence as a condition to peace talks and a withdrawal of foreign forces. Negotiations toward an end to decades of internecine warfare, of course, would be contingent on firm governance, and Abdullah’s continued insistence that Ghani had stolen the 2019 presidential election was detracting from any semblance of stability in Kabul. The US had already shown its displeasure by threatening to cut $1 billion in aid. The power-sharing deal reportedly will extend beyond just Abdullah and his followers, and will allocate the post of military chief to Abdul Rashid Dostum, a former vice president who fled the country under charges that he had ordered a political rival to be tortured.
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