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Parliament votes off most of Karzai's Cabinet

posted: 02-01-2010 by: Martine van Bijlert

After over two weeks of listening to presentations by the candidate ministers and being subjected to lobbying and negotiations, the Lower House of Parliament finally voted. And only seven out of twenty-four ministers were passed.

It can be no coincidence that six of them were sitting ministers about which the internationals had made it quite clear that they would like to see them remain. The approval of the seventh, the former minister of Culture Raheen, comes as a bit of a surprise. Raheen had failed to receive the vote in April 2006 (with respectively 93 votes for, 131 against, 19 blank and 1 invalid) and was considered by many as either too liberal or too pro-persian. He was however also widely seen as having the backing of the international community, which in this case seems to have worked in his favour.

Two of the candidates who failed to gather enough votes, can at least seek comfort in the fact that they received more positive than negative votes – respectively Ghazanfar for Women’s Affairs and Ismail Khan on Energy & Water, with Ghazanfar being only 2 votes short. The three least popular candidates managed to gather only a handful of votes (Munshi, Khodaidad and Abdullahi with respectively 39, 36 and 33 votes).

From a distance, and without the benefit of political gossip, the results seem to indicate that the Parliament has turned against the re-introduction of ministers who are considered to have failed to deliver and the introduction of new ministers who are seen to hold no promise of improvement.

It is not clear how taken aback the president will be by this result and how he will respond. There seems to be a general sense that several of the candidate-ministers were introduced for no other reason than to show that the president was keeping his part of the bargain (with the understanding that they may not actually survive the vote). In those cases where the president would however like to force his hand, although there do not seem to be that many ministers that he would feel strongly about, he will be confronted with a new bill passed by Parliament last week, barring him from appointing voted-off candidates as acting ministers - an attempt to prevent a repeat of the past, when Assadullah Khaled and Chakari, who were rejected by Parliament as ministers of Border Affairs and Haj, simply turned up at the office the next day and served as acting ministers until recently. Before the vote the president had already issued a decree putting the current deputy ministers in charge as acting ministers.

But whatever happens, it is clear that for the moment the country only has a core Cabinet, and it may well take weeks again before new candidates are introduced, have presented their credentials and are taken to the vote.

The Afghanistan Analyst Network

Parliament votes off most of Karzai's Cabinet

After over two weeks of listening to presentations by the candidate ministers and being subjected to lobbying and negotiations, the Lower House of Parliament finally voted. And only seven out of twenty-four ministers were passed.