KABUL: Thousands of polling centers across Afghanistan opened for voting Thursday, and millions of Afghans were expected to choose a new president to lead a nation plagued by armed insurgency, drugs, corruption and a feeble government.
Turnout, particularly in the violent south, will be key to the vote’s success the country’s second direct presidential election. Taliban militants have pledged to disrupt the vote and have circulated threats that those who cast ballots will be punished.
“Yes, we are going to vote,” Abdul Rahman, 35, said as he stood 50 yards (meters) outside a polling center in Kabul. He and his friends were waiting to see a line of people go inside and vote safely before casting ballots. “If anything happens to the polling center, we don’t want to be too close to it.”
Helicopters circled overhead in the capital as police manned extra checkpoints. In one northern Kabul neighborhood, a car with loudspeakers encouraged people to vote.
Karzai, who has held power since the Taliban was ousted eight years ago, is favored to finish first among 36 official candidates, although a late surge by former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah could force a runoff if no one wins more than 50 percent.
Preliminary results were expected to be announced Saturday Kabul time.
Violence has risen sharply in Afghanistan the last three years, and the U.S. now has more than 60,000 forces in the country close to eight years after the U.S. invasion following the Sept. 11 attacks of 2001.
International officials predict an imperfect outcome for a vote that they hope Afghans will accept as credible a key component of President Barack Obama’s war strategy.
On the eve of the balloting, the U.S. military announced the deaths of six more Americans putting August on track to become the deadliest month for American forces since the war began. Rising death tolls underscore the urgency of establishing a strong, effective government to stem the growing Taliban insurgency.
Karzai, a favorite of the Bush administration, won in 2004 with 55.4 percent of the vote, riding into office on a wave of public optimism after decades of war and ruinous Taliban rule. As the U.S. shifted resources to the war in Iraq, Afghanistan fell into steep decline, marked by record opium poppy harvests, deepening government corruption and skyrocketing violence.
Faced with growing public discontent, Karzai has sought to ensure his re-election by striking alliances with regional power brokers, naming as a running-mate a Tajik strongman whom he once fired as defense minister and welcoming home notorious Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, allegedly responsible in the deaths of up to 2,000 Taliban prisoners early in the Afghan war.
Those figures are believed capable of delivering millions of votes among their followers, but their presence in the Karzai inner circle has raised fears in Western capitals that the president will be unable to fulfill promises to fight corruption in a second term.
Voter turnout especially in the insurgency-plagued Pashtun south is likely to be crucial not only to Karzai’s chances but also to public acceptance of the results. Karzai is widely expected to run strong among his fellow Pashtuns, the country’s largest ethnic group which also forms the overwhelming majority of the Taliban.
Abdullah, son of a Pashtun father and a Tajik mother, is expected to win much of his votes in the Tajik north, where security is better and turnout likely to be bigger. Abdullah, an ophthalmologist who has railed against government corruption, was a member of the U.S.-backed alliance that overthrew the Taliban in 2001 and would be expected to maintain close ties with the West.
One fear is that Abdullah’s followers may charge fraud and take to the streets if Karzai claims a first-round victory without a strong southern turnout.
The country has been rife with rumors of ballot stuffing, bogus registrations and trafficking in registration cards on behalf of the incumbent, allegations his campaign has denied.
Mindful of the dangers, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged Afghans this week to hold “credible, secure and inclusive elections” and called on candidates and their supporters “to behave responsibly before and after the elections” a clear warning against street demonstrations by disappointed politicians.
“It’s very difficult in Afghanistan to see perfect elections,” Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s Afghanistan-Pakistan envoy, said during a news conference in Pakistan. “Nowhere in the world (is there) a perfect election. Don’t expect perfect elections in Afghanistan.”
In the south, turnout may be affected by the Taliban campaign of intimidation whispered threats, posted warnings and a run of headline-grabbing attacks in Kabul aimed at frightening Afghans from going to the polls.
“The Taliban control our area and they have already warned us that they will cut off our fingers or kill us if we vote,” said Abdul Majid, 25, a shop owner in Ghazni city. “I don’t want to vote.”
In Afghanistan’s two most important and dangerous southern provinces where thousands of U.S. troops deployed this summer more than 130 polling stations will not open, officials said. These included 107 out of 242 polling stations in Helmand province, the focus of the most recent fighting, and 17 out of 271 in Kandahar, where the Taliban Islamist movement was born.
Underscoring the threat, four election workers were killed Tuesday delivering materials to a polling station in northeastern Badakhshan, a province generally considered safe. Two elections workers died in a separate incident the same day when their vehicle hit a roadside bomb in Kandahar province, officials said Wednesday.
And on the eve of the voting, three gunmen described by police as Taliban militants took over a bank in Kabul. Police stormed the building and killed the three.
Anthony Cordesman, a former Pentagon analyst from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the election “is not functional democracy by Western standards” but the important thing would be for Afghans to “feel the election was legitimate by their standards.”
If not, he wrote in a commentary, Afghans will “see the government as distant, corrupt, and ineffective,” and empower the Taliban. AGENCIES
SAMAA
Shilpa Shetty is planning to get saucier than ever and launch her own range of ready-made food, a report has claimed. She is also considering starting a chain of restaurants in honour of her Big Brother co-participant Jade Goody, who died in March. And the ready made food she plans to begin her new business with is poppadoms. One must remember that Jade Goody called her “Shilpa Poppa-dom” on Big Brother, which then sparked the whole racial row. “Shilpa thinks Jade will have a little chuckle in heaven about the poppadoms,” the Daily Star quoted a source as saying. Shilpa’s chicken curry, which divided the house with accusations of under-cooked meat and excessive use of onions, is also expected to be included in the menu. “She has been inundated with requests for her curry recipe and one day she just thought: ‘Why don’t I just create my own range? One of Shilpa’s passions in life is healthy living so she wanted to incorporate that into her dishes,” the source added.
Staff Report
By Khaleeq Kiani
