Will hand over power only elected successor: Ghani

KABUL (Pajhwok): Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has said 98 US nationals and 40,000 Afghans have been killed in Afghanistan since 2015.

During an interview with CNN, the president said he will hand over power to his successor only through election.

“My basic goal is to be able to hand power, through the will of the people, to my elected successor,” Ghani said in the online interview which was also attended by first lady, Rula Ghani on Friday.

His statement about transfer of power to another elected president comes as speculations about forming an interim government once again emerge in the Afghan media.

There are rumors that Zalmay Khalilzad in his recent trip to Kabul proposed an interim government to Ghani, but the president refused to meet him.

About the intra-Afghan talks, Ghani said, “The international community and regional countries have agreed with us about an independent, democratic, united and peaceful Afghanistan, the goal that should be achieved.”

He said if the goal was accepted, there would be more progress in the ongoing peace negotiations.

“My basic goal is to be able to hand power, through the will of the people, to my elected successor. This is crucial to enable us to both honor the sacrifice of our civilians, our activists, and others,” he said.

However, he said if the Taliban tried to dominate its power over others, it would cause negative consequences.

“One thing needs to be clear; the Afghan society is not willing to go back and we’re not a type of society that the Taliban-type approach of the past can be imposed on us. That was the peace of the graveyard. We want a positive peace where all of us together overcome our past, embrace each other and together rebuild an Afghanistan that can be what I call a roundabout,” he added.

He said that 98 US nationals and 40,000 Afghan soldiers and civilians have been killed in Afghanistan since 2015.

“To define what US security interests in Afghanistan and the region are, an agreement on the future stability of Afghanistan, guaranteed both by the region and the international community is essential to end forty years of conflict, the process must be truly owned and led by the Afghan government and the Afghan people, and the scale and scope of US presence in Afghanistan need to be defined,” Ghani said.

He said that future presence of US forces in Afghanistan should be also defined.

Ghani said he was not a supporter of extensive presence of US forces in Afghanistan, but it depended on the newly elected US president about mutual interests of both countries.

Mds/ma