Afghan Vote Turnout Likely Hampered by Taliban Threat

James Rupert James Rupert –

Fri Aug 21, 2009, 2:07 am ET

 (Bloomberg) --

Voters in Afghanistan’s presidential election may have failed to deliver the increased turnout sought by Afghan and U.S. officials, hindering efforts to win a broader mandate for the government as it battles Taliban fighters.

Din Mohammad, Karzai’s campaign chief, told Agence France- Presse that the president was decisively leading the count and there would be no need for a run-off ballot. A spokesman for Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai’s chief challenger, said partial results had the opposition candidate leading, AFP said.

As days of ballot-counting began, residents and international election monitors in several provinces said yesterday’s election lacked the lengthy voter lines and public celebrations of the presidential vote five years ago.

The Taliban conducted 73 attacks during the day across 15 of the country’s 34 provinces, President Hamid Karzai told reporters in Kabul, without giving details. Twenty to 30 people died in voting day attacks, according to counts by international and Afghan news organizations.

“The streets were eerily quiet” in the southern city of Kandahar, where drummers and dancers performed outside polling places in 2004, said Hardin Lang, a monitor with Democracy International Inc., a Washington-based elections organization.

“The turnout appeared rather low in comparison to the last time,” said Lang. “There was no anecdotal evidence of enthusiasm.”

Results Next Week?

A separate AFP report cited the election authority as saying the turnout was between 40 percent and 50 percent, compared with 70 percent in the last election. Counting has been completed and the results will be released early next week, AFP said.

“The early information is that the turnout was very low in some provinces and at best was fair in others,” said Haroun Mir, director of Afghanistan’s Center for Research & Policy Studies.

The unenthusiastic turnout raised speculation Karzai would fail to win 50 percent of the vote, which would put him in a runoff against his leading challenger, said Abubakar Siddique, an Afghan political analyst.

Two opinion surveys this month show that his top rival is his former foreign minister, Abdullah, who draws his main support from the ethnic Tajik regions of north Afghanistan. Afghan news reports spoke of a higher turnout in many northern provinces than in the south, which may benefit Abdullah.

While the election showed the Taliban’s ability to disrupt a nationwide vote, it also was a “a considerable blow to the Taliban, who were not able” to stop it, Siddique said.

‘Propitious Sign’

Karzai and the Obama administration hailed the vote.

“The successful conduct of elections” is “a propitious sign for establishing a democratically elected government and promoting democracy in the country,” the Afghan president told reporters after the polls closed.

“Lots of people have defied threats of violence and terror to express their thoughts about the next government,” said Robert Gibbs, a White House spokesman.

As the Obama administration shifts America’s national security focus -- and U.S. troops -- from Iraq to Afghanistan, it needs a stronger Afghan government to confront Taliban militants whose attacks are killing record numbers of foreign troops and Afghan civilians.

In the 65,000-strong U.S.-led coalition, 283 troops have been killed this year, a rate 50 percent higher than last year, and setting a record, according to the monitoring group iCasualties. The coalition said a U.S. soldier died yesterday in a mortar attack in the east of the country. More than 1,000 civilians were killed through June, 20 percent more than last year’s record high, United Nations figures show.

Increased Registration

While Afghan officials set no specific measurements for success in the vote, they have touted a yearlong increase in voter registration, from about 10 million to 15 million, as a sign the election would bring increased participation and a stronger democratic base to the next government.

Zekria Barakzai, an election commission official, said the turnout might reach 50 percent, Agence France-Presse reported, meaning a total of 7 million to 8 million votes cast. That would be similar in number to the 8 million who voted in 2004, though it would represent a decline in the percentage of eligible voters taking part, from 70 percent five years ago.

While the election commission said earlier this month that it hoped to open as many as 7,000 polling stations, it said yesterday only 6,200 had actually operated. Many of the closures of planned polling stations came in the ethnic Pashtun south, where the Taliban are most active, said reports from Afghanistan’s Pajhwok news agency.

Taliban Warning

Guerrillas patrolled the highway between Kabul and Kandahar, stopping traffic in Ghazni province to warn people not to vote, Pajhwok reported. The Taliban warned in leaflets distributed in southern Afghanistan that it would cut off people’s index fingers if they were marked by the ink used by polling officials to show they had voted, according to local residents.

Two voters were hanged in Kandahar, the New York Times reported, citing unidentified witnesses.

For the past eight years, Karzai and his international backers have failed to contain the fighting or fulfill Afghans’ aspirations for an economic recovery from three decades of war. Measured by income, life expectancy and literacy, Afghanistan is the world’s fifth-poorest country, according to a 2007 report by the Afghan government and the United Nations.

An April security map prepared by the Afghan government and UN agencies showed that the Taliban either control or pose a “high risk” of attack in 40 percent of Afghanistan, according to Peter Bergen, a senior fellow at the Washington-based New America Foundation.