KABUL, Afghanistan — During his two years of recovery at Walter Reed, the American military’s pre-eminent medical facility, Asadullah Khalid was known as the miracle patient.
Mr. Khalid barely survived a Taliban assassination attempt in 2012, when he was the Afghan intelligence chief. A disguised suicide bomber had just finished lunch with Mr. Khalid, sitting right across from him, and set off his explosives at point-blank range as the dishes were being taken away.
Mr. Khalid’s torso was ripped apart, and it took dozens of operations before he could begin learning to walk again. His first three steps, he said, were the most painful moments he can remember.
Nearly six years after he cheated death, Mr. Khalid, 48, is facing long odds again, but of his own choosing. He is stepping out from the shadowy world of espionage that shaped him from a young age, and into the messy field of Afghan politics in the hopes of becoming president.
In recent weeks, he marshaled crowds of mostly young supporters at a rally in Kabul, the Afghan capital, and in Khost, in the southeast, to mark the creation of a political party that he hopes can become a factor in the presidential election next spring.
Mr. Khalid has been many things: a wunderkind operative and money man for the mujahedeen as they fought Afghanistan’s Communist regime in the 1980s; a provincial governor and staunch ally of the Americans as he hunted Taliban militants after the invasion; a feared spy chief followed by dark whispers about torture. Above all, he has been a survivor.
Now, he has also become a troubling development for Afghanistan’s struggling president, Ashraf Ghani.
“Can we keep quiet any longer about these two doctors?” Mr. Khalid said at the rally, referring to Mr. Ghani, a doctor of anthropology, and his coalition partner Abdullah Abdullah, an ophthalmologist.
In the absence of strong political parties, presidential hopes in Afghanistan live or die on an array of scattershot coalitions, each usually with a member of the Pashtun ethnic majority as its leader.
With the vote just months away, that coalition-building, and the jockeying among Pashtun public figures to lead them, is at a full sprint. The incumbent, Mr. Ghani, has declared that he will seek re-election, but his struggle on every front, from deteriorating security to the disintegration of the coalition that got him elected, has given hope to his potential opponents.
Presidential candidates won’t be registered until after the parliamentary elections in October. But many members of Mr. Ghani’s coalition are already positioning to rally behind others or throw their own hats in the ring. The latest of those defections is Hanif Atmar, Mr. Ghani’s influential national security adviser, who quit last week amid signs he is considering a run.
Several of the potential first-time contenders are, like Mr. Khalid, former security ministers. Although his chances are unclear, Mr. Khalid has in his favor his perceived closeness to the C.I.A. and other American officials (former President Barack Obama visited him in the hospital and kept an interest in his recovery), and an ease with the former Afghan warlords who are the current power brokers in the country’s politics.
His comeback has been a long road. His took his first physical steps years…
