In A First, Afghanistan Is Set To Change Leaders At The Ballot Box --- Afghanistan is about to get a new leader for the first time since the Taliban were driven out in 2001 and replaced by the current president, Hamid Karzai. -- Saturday's presidential runoff will be a historic event in Afghanistan, marking the first time in the country's long and often painful history that power has changed hands through the ballot box. -- Karzai is barred from running again, and the only two names on the ballot will be Abdullah Abdullah, an ophthalmologist and former foreign minister, and Ashraf Ghani, a former finance minister and World Bank official. -- The official campaign period has come to an end, and candidates are now observing a silence period as election and security officials make final preparations. -- Abdullah enters the runoff as the front-runner, having won 45 percent of the vote in the first round on April 5. He's an ophthalmologist by training who became a medic with the mujahedeen, the Afghan fighters who battled the Soviet forces in the 1980s. Abdullah then became an adviser to the famous rebel commander Ahmad Shah Massoud. -- Abdullah later served as foreign minister in Karzai's government, but split from Karzai in 2006 and challenged the incumbent president in the 2009 election. Abdullah received 30 percent of the vote but dropped out of the runoff against Karzai because he said the election was rigged in favor of the president. --- Ghani, meanwhile, is seen as a technocrat, compared with Abdullah the diplomat and politician. Ghani, a Pashtun from the eastern province of Logar, won 31.5 percent of the vote in the first round. After completing high school in Afghanistan, he earned a bachelor's degree at the American University of Beirut. He later earned a doctorate in cultural anthropology at Columbia University, and taught at the University of California, Berkeley and Johns Hopkins. -- He then became a senior official at the World Bank. After the fall of the Taliban, he returned to Afghanistan, playing a key role in the formation of the new government and serving as finance minister. -- Over the years, Ghani has become a leading analyst on developing countries and is the author of the book Fixing Failed States. -- While the two men have different personalities and tend not to get along with each other, they share a desire to strengthen ties with the U.S. Both candidates have said they will sign a security agreement with the U.S. as soon he's elected. --- And Afghanistan is still a fledgling democracy where voters are more often swayed by tribal, ethnic and family affiliations than by who has the better tax plan. - Most, NPR, http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/06/13/321331920/in-a-first-afghanistan-is-set-to-change-leaders-at-the-ballot-box