KABUL, Afghanistan — Through a tumultuous first six months as president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani has been living up to his promises to transform the office. But rather than decentralizing the post’s powers, as he had vowed, he has instead been quietly creating an even more dominant presidency, according to a range of current and former Afghan officials.
In the name of fighting corruption, Mr. Ghani is bringing billions of dollars in procurement deals under his direct purview, denying ministries the opportunity to contract their own goods and services.
And staff members under Mr. Ghani’s authority are even directly writing and carrying out policy for the government, leaving some ministry officials wondering what their jobs are anymore, some officials say, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering the president.
All that, and other consolidation measures, are happening as the completion of the American-backed plan for a unity government shared by Mr. Ghani and his rival, Abdullah Abdullah, remains hung up in delay and dissent, leaving many cabinet posts and governorships unfilled. It is one of the pressing issues hanging over Mr. Ghani’s first presidential visit to the United States, scheduled to begin Sunday night.
There is growing concern, however, that cooperating with Mr. Abdullah is not high on Mr. Ghani’s list. Some critics of the president believe that he sees the continuing deadlock as a useful chance to consolidate power before Mr. Abdullah’s side can settle in — and that the president’s desire to single-handedly reshape Afghan politics could take him down a more authoritarian path.
Mr. Ghani’s aides deny those accusations, insisting that there is no purposeful effort to centralize powers or cut out the ministries. Instead, they say that they are simply doing the work that no one else appears willing to do, and that they would welcome others’ sharing the load. They add that many of the measures are critical to cutting down on the corruption that has become endemic in the Afghan government.
“The Afghan people and the international community want a government free of corruption, and we are committed to do that,” said Ajmal Abidy, the spokesman for the presidential palace. “The office is meant to enable the president. What we do should be effective; it is not to monopolize and centralize power.”
The spokesman also said that the staff members in the president’s office were not writing and carrying out policy, but merely coordinating efforts with the president as the office has done in the past.
Some former officials who worked in the administrative offices of the palace, where a majority of the changes are taking place, support Mr. Ghani’s promises of change. But they worry that if left unchecked, the consolidation of power in the presidency could destroy any hope for building a functioning democratic state.
“Centralization can be to the benefit of Afghanistan, because you need to lead from the center,” said Najib Amin, a former high-ranking member of the administrative offices under former President Hamid Karzai who considers himself a friend of Mr. Ghani’s. “But if you do it in the wrong way, it’s a recipe for a dictatorship.”
Driving much of the change is a feeling among his loyalists that Mr. Ghani has inherited a government that simply does not have the capacity to govern — and so he and his supporters are finding ways to get around the roadblocks. The primary route for that appears to be through the Office of the Administration of the President, which Mr. Ghani promised to shutter during his election campaign.
While Mr. Karzai used the administrative side of his office as a political appendage to supplement the ministries or other agencies, Mr. Ghani, by some accounts, is now using it to supplant them — sometimes in ways that appear to contradict the law.
In the past week, for instance, a legal adviser to the president summoned 300 prosecutors to the palace for testing — a move that, while meant to improve the rule of law, is seen as crossing the line into improper executive meddling with the judiciary. A spokesman for Mr. Ghani said the move was done at the urging of civil society organizations.
Upon taking over as president, Mr. Ghani combined the administration office with Mr. Karzai’s chief of staff’s office, creating one structure that appeared to make good on his promise to slash bureaucracy.
Then the ranks began to swell. Mr. Ghani began adding new leadership roles within the office, in some cases slots that were treated with benefits on a par with cabinet ministers. Some officials estimate he has grown the staff by as much as 20 percent — in part, they say, because when he was forced into a unity government he lost jobs that he expected to be able to dole out to supporters.
But it was not simply the size of the office that was changing. Where Mr. Karzai deployed his seasoned political advisers to sell and promote his agenda, Mr. Ghani’s cadre of young operators is trying to execute his vision without interference from the messy, complicated politics of the ministries.
“They act like the bosses of the ministries,” said a former Afghan official who until recently used to work in the palace.
In centralizing power, Mr. Ghani could upend one of his main points of appeal to Western officials, as well. As a former World Bank official and decorated academic with a focus on state building, Mr. Ghani promised to create institutions. Western officials, preparing to scale back involvement after more than a decade, expressed enthusiasm for Mr. Ghani’s designs.
So far, however, only two of his 34 governors are permanent; the rest are awaiting their replacements, or less likely, their appointment. More than half of his cabinet is empty, and several important posts, including the attorney general and the chief justice of the Supreme Court, remain vacant.
Still, he has managed to move aggressively on some tenets of his anticorruption campaign — although often in ways that have rankled rather than assured.
Mr. Ghani, who has a notorious temper, has abruptly fired top officials, whether members of the security establishment or provincial governors. Some were summarily dismissed with little more than a harsh word or two — and often without having a replacement in mind.
He has even stepped in to expel Western officials, including the head of one United Nations agency in Afghanistan over which he has no formal authority.
Western officials say dealing with Mr. Ghani and his short fuse can be trying. Though he is a relentless worker — up early, to bed late, reading 500-page reports overnight and discussing the finer points of them in the morning — his attitude can be tough to manage.
“I’ve spent a lot of time here going around Afghanistan with its fighting and bombings, but the only time I start to get scared is when I’m running late for a meeting with Ghani,” said one Western official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
At the same time, Mr. Ghani is facing an inherently divided government. After a tense election that was called into question by widespread fraud, he was forced into a power-sharing deal with Mr. Abdullah. Under the agreement’s terms, Mr. Abdullah and his allies are allowed to appoint half of the cabinet ministers, including for the Interior Ministry and the Foreign Ministry.
But officials interviewed about the state of the relationship say that Mr. Ghani’s camp, concerned by a potentially competing power center within the government, is already moving to isolate Mr. Abdullah’s appointees and allies. Decrees from Mr. Abdullah’s office must even go through Mr. Ghani’s administrative wing.
“They are still thinking like they are in campaign mode,” said another former Afghan official with close ties to the Ghani camp.
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