They could have elements of what is often referred to as federalism for instance one of Abdullah’s proposals is to have the governors elected. Always Afghanistan’s governors are appointed and interestingly the appointed governor is almost never from the province to which he is appointed. That is an old sort of strategy which has to do with having people who aren’t from the areas so that they are neutral and also it means that the king can control what goes on, so there are some proposals about sort of the domestic political structure of Afghanistan that Abdullah might actually pursue differently than Karzai. But, on the international side as far as the counter insurgency effort and so on, you know, they are fairly well aligned. They are both generally supportive of the idea of reconciliation with insurgent groups, again they might handle it differently. I think that the big difference is that you know, in any political culture whether it is the United States or Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabia might be a bad example of this although you know, any ruler after a significant period of time starts to look bad you know. They all make mistakes, they all do things that are unpopular, they run out of fresh ideas. Hamid Karzai has essentially been President for almost eight years of Afghanistan during an extremely challenging time and I think that for Afghan appreciation of the power of what democratic governance means as well as for getting Afghanistan out of rot, I mean the last 3 years have been a terrible retrograde moment for Afghanistan that fresh leadership is really needed. Now that is not to say that it can’t be Karzai with a new team and maybe a new person in a sort of prime ministerial position, but I think one of the differences that Abdullah could make and he will have a lot of faults is well is bringing a fresh team and a fresh perspective to a series of problems that have obviously confounded the current government.
Speaker 1: Any other questions? Yes in the back.
Speaker 4: My name is Suleiman [???], I am formerly the planning commission of Pakistan. Looking forward, I mean beyond the elections, you mentioned Afghanistan being a plurality and evolved and everything, but the reality is that you have 40 million Pashtuns if you cross the [???] line, which is the large ethnic population without a doubt. Compared to the Kurdish population it is only 70 million and I am not including the 40 million [???] which runs the traffic from Karachi to Islamabad and others and that to me something is to ponder over. I was talking to a friend of mine Ashraf [???] and basically said Afghanistan is just limited to Kabul. You know, elections will be decided in Kabul and then what happened around all these other provinces were ethnic lines. So I do expect an election even if the fairest elections were held, I don’t know what the expectations would have been so I am just making a comment and I thank you for your insights.
Speaker 1: Let him address that first and then we will get back to you.
Speaker 2: Well it wasn’t so much of a question.
Speaker 1: Than the comment, okay let us just take the next then.
Speaker 5: My name is Sonali [???]. At the end of your speech you talked about some ways of improving ballot monitoring, you talked about parallel vote tabulation for instance, but under the current substances when the system is still very much centralized, how could we achieve better results with ballot monitoring for instance if considering that the people, the Afghans who monitored the ballots are also appointed by Karzai directly. In that case I think we would need *foreign ballot monitors in Afghanistan, which could also increase the resistance to you know, foreign people participating and monitoring their elections because there is already this [???] you know, foreign nationalism there. What are your thoughts on that? Thank you.