Afghans vote for president under violence threat

(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-08-20 15:13

Afghan President Hamid Karzai holds up his inked stained finger after voting in the presidential election in Kabul August 20, 2009. [Agencies]

Karzai, wearing his traditional purple and green striped robe, voted at 7 am. He dipped a finger in indelible ink — a fraud prevention measure — and held it up for the cameras.

"I request from the Afghan people to come out and vote so through their vote Afghanistan will be more secure, more peaceful," Karzai said. "Vote. No violence."

Preliminary results were expected to be announced in Kabul on Saturday.

Violence has risen sharply in Afghanistan the last three years, and the US now has more than 60,000 forces in the country close to eight years after the US invasion following the Sept. 11 attacks of 2001.

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 US 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 Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum.

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 US-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.

"It's very difficult in Afghanistan to see perfect elections," Richard Holbrooke, Obama's Afghanistan-Pakistan envoy, said during a news conference in Pakistan on Wednesday. "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.

In Afghanistan's two most important and dangerous southern provinces — where thousands of US 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, six election workers were killed around the country on Tuesday while delivering ballots. 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.

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Related Links

• Office of President of Afghanistan
• Official Website of Dr. Abdullah Abdullah
• Independent Election Commission
• Electoral Complaints Commission
• UNDP's ELECT Project