Afghan voters brave attacks, delays to vote

Afghans braved the threat of militant attacks and delays at polling booths to vote in a presidential election on Saturday, a major test of the Western-backed Afghan government’s ability to protect democracy despite Taliban attempts to derail the polls.

The election was marred by numerous small-scale Taliban attacks, but only one confirmed death. However, turnout was low, and the violence, plus the Taliban’s earlier threats to attack polling stations, may be a major reason. More than 9 million registered voters could have headed to the polls to elect a president among a dozen candidates, led by President Ashraf Ghani and his former deputy Abdullah Abdullah.

The winner will play a crucial role in the country’s quest to end the war with the Taliban and any resumption of talks between the insurgents and the United States that were called off earlier this month.

Due to the difficulty of collecting results across Afghanistan, the overall results will not be known before 7 November .

The Taliban, which controls more of the country than at anytime since its regime was toppled in 2001, has threatened voters to stay away from the election or face dire consequences. To protect voters and polling stations, tens of thousands of Afghan forces were deployed across 34 provinces. A senior interior ministry official in Kabul said at least 21 civilians and two Afghan forces were injured in about a dozen small-scale attacks conducted by the Taliban during the first five hours of voting.

“The security plan used to prevent attacks seems to be working so far we have foiled insurgent attacks,” said Abdul Moqim Abdulrahimzai, the director-general of operations and planning at the Interior Ministry.

Officials with Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission (IEC) said, however, that they have had no contact with 901 of the 4,942 polling centres across the country, creating doubt about how significant overall turnout will be.

It was not clear whether voting had taken place in these centres, or they were forced by the Taliban to shut down. Turnout was “very poor” in the election’s opening hours, said the Transparent Election Foundation of Afghanistan, which was observing polls in all provinces.

That was partly due to the requirement for voters to be photographed, to which female voters in conservative areas object, the foundation said.

However, by the afternoon, hundreds of voters complained that their names were missing on the voters’ list or on the biometric device used to prevent fraud.

Addressing the concerns of disgruntled voters, the country’s Independent Election Commission (IEC) eased the restrictions, allowing them to vote if they have election stickers on their national identity cards. Small-scale Taliban attacks took place across the country.

An explosion at a polling station in a mosque in the southern city of Kandahar wounded 16 people, according to a security source. In the northern province of Faryab, Afghan forces clashed with Taliban fighters in six districts, forcing people to stay indoors and refrain from voting.

The Taliban said their fighters attacked polling stations in Laghman province, in eastern Afghanistan. Officials said four explosions in the eastern city of Jalalabad, in which one person was killed, disrupted voting at some stations.

Blasts also hit Kabul and Ghazni, officials said, while more than 400 polling centres remained closed because they were in areas under Taliban control. Afghanistan’s political scene is still tainted by the aftermath of that vote, which forced the two main rival groupings to form an unstable partnership. Both sides were accused of massive electoral cheating.