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Afghans Vote in Strong Numbers Despite Dangers Afghan Turnout Is High as Voters Defy the Taliban
(about 3 hours later)
KABUL, Afghanistan — Braving cold, rain and Taliban attacks, Afghans gathered in such long lines at polling places that voting hours were extended nationwide so they could cast their ballots to choose the successor to President Hamid Karzai on Saturday. KABUL, Afghanistan — Defying a campaign of Taliban violence that unleashed 39 suicide bombers in the two months before Election Day, Afghan voters on Saturday turned out in such numbers to choose a new president and provincial councils that polling hours were extended nationwide, in a triumph of determination over intimidation.
Rather than the widespread disruption that the Taliban had promised in recent months, the thing most on display was determination, as Afghans turned out in higher numbers than expected, including in some places where votes were scarce in the 2009 election. There was no heavy barrage of attacks, though fears of potential violence did keep roughly one in eight polling centers closed nationwide. Militants failed to mount a single major attack anywhere in Afghanistan by the time polls closed, and voters lined up despite heavy rain and cold in the capital and elsewhere.
For the first time, Afghans were voting on what appeared to be an open field of candidates, after Mr. Karzai’s dozen years in power. Accordingly, no one expected a quick result Saturday: the top three candidates were expected to closely divide up the vote, and a runoff election seemed certain. That election would probably be held no sooner than May 28, continuing Mr. Karzai’s time in office for another two months at least. Even partial official results were not expected for a week. “Whenever there has been a new king or president, it has been accompanied by death and violence,” said Abdul Wakil Amiri, a government official who turned out early to vote at a Kabul mosque. “For the first time, we are experiencing democracy.”
With eight candidates in the race, the five minor candidates’ shares of the vote made it even more difficult for any one candidate to reach the 50 percent threshold that would allow outright victory. After 12 years with President Hamid Karzai in power, and decades of upheaval, coup and war, Afghans on Saturday were for the first time voting on a relatively open field of candidates.
The leading candidates going into the vote were Ashraf Ghani, 64, a technocrat and former official in Mr. Karzai’s government; Abdullah Abdullah, 53, a former foreign minister who was the second biggest vote-getter against Mr. Karzai in the 2009 election; and Zalmay Rassoul, 70, another former foreign minister, who is the only major candidate with a woman on his ticket as vice-presidential candidate, Habiba Sarobi. Informal polls in recent weeks showed Mr. Abdullah and Mr. Ghani in the lead, but polling in Afghanistan is notoriously unreliable. Election officials said that by midday more than three and a half million voters had turned out — already approaching the total for the 2009 vote. The election commission chairman, Mohammad Yusuf Nuristani, said the total could reach seven million.
Early in the day, in a high school near the presidential palace, an emotional Mr. Karzai cast his own vote for his successor. “I, as a citizen of Afghanistan, did this with happiness and pride,” he said afterward. But even as they celebrated the outpouring of votes, many acknowledged the long process looming ahead, with the potential for problems all along the way.
The streets of the capital, swamped by a heavy rain, were almost entirely devoid of vehicle traffic, except for members of the police force and the military, who were on duty at checkpoints every few hundred feet and searched nearly everyone passing by. International observers, many of whom had fled Afghanistan after a wave of attacks on foreigners during the campaign, cautioned that how those votes were tallied and reported would bear close watching.
Most people walked to vote. Long lines had already formed when polls opened at 7 a.m. in Kabul and other major cities. It is likely to take at least a week before even incomplete official results are announced, and weeks more to adjudicate Election Day complaints. Some of the candidates were already filing fraud complaints on Saturday.
“People have realized that electing the president is far more important than standing in the rain,” said a voter, Abdullah Abdullah, 24, who had the same name as the candidate he said he was planning to vote for at a Kabul high school polling place. With eight candidates in the race, the five minor candidates’ shares of the vote made it even more difficult for any one candidate to reach the 50 percent threshold that would allow an outright victory. A runoff vote is unlikely to take place until the end of May at the earliest.
“Whenever there has been a new king or president, it has been accompanied by death and violence,” said Abdul Wakil Amiri, an attorney who turned out early to vote at a Kabul mosque. “For the first time, we are experiencing democracy.” The leading candidates going into the vote were Ashraf Ghani, 64, a technocrat and former official in Mr. Karzai’s government; Abdullah Abdullah, 53, a former foreign minister who was the second biggest vote-getter against Mr. Karzai in the 2009 election; and Zalmay Rassoul, 70, another former foreign minister.
To provide security for the voting, the Afghan government mobilized its entire military and police forces, some 350,000 in all, backed up by 53,000 NATO coalition troops – although the Americans and their allies planned no direct involvement except in case of an extreme emergency. A shortage of ballots at polling places, widespread across the country by midday Saturday, left with increasingly frustrated voters waiting for hours. Some were rewarded, as officials managed to rush in new ballots to meet the demand. Others waited in vain.
The authorities did not expect that, however, as the overall level of violence in the months leading to the voting was much lower than before the vote in the summer of 2009, when Mr. Karzai was re-elected. This time, the Afghan security forces are nearly twice as numerous, and the election is taking place before the traditional start of the fighting season, both factors that have reduced violence by anywhere from nine to 25 percent compared with the pre-election period in 2009, according to United Nations officials. More worrisome, the threat of violence in many rural areas had forced election authorities to close nearly 1,000 out of a planned-for 7,500 polling places, raising fears that a big chunk of the electorate would remain disenfranchised — although in at least some of those areas voters were able to seek more secure voting places.
A series of high-profile attacks on foreigners, including the murder on Friday of an Associated Press photographer and the wounding of her colleague, created an impression of greater violence, but were also indications that insurgents did not have as much capacity to strike forcefully during this campaign. They did not manage a single major attack on any campaign event, for instance, and two attacks on the Independent Election Commission had little direct effect on the voting. But when it came to attacks on election day, the Taliban’s threats seemed to be greatly overstated. Only one suicide bombing attempt could be confirmed — in Khost — and the bomber managed to kill only himself when the police stopped him outside a polling place.
In the days before the voting, only one police officer was killed in attacks on convoys of election officials delivering materials, in Logar Province, according to the Afghan police. Halfway through election day, four voters were reported killed in a smattering of incidents, including two in insurgent attacks in the east — one in Kunar Province, the other in Paktia province. In three scattered attacks on polling places, four voters were reported killed. Two rockets fired randomly into the city of Jalalabad wounded three civilians, none of them even voting age. One border policeman, in southern Kandahar Province, and another policeman in remote western Farah province were confirmed killed in Taliban attacks. There were reports that up to eight Afghan Local Police members had been killed in northern Kunduz Province, though the authorities said Saturday evening that they were false.
A bomb set off at a polling place in the Mohammad Agha district of Logar killed two voters and wounded two others, but the polling place reopened half an hour later, according to the district governor, Abdul Hamid. An election observer there, Qazi Nasim Modaser, said, “Now people are going back to the polling station.” Bad as all that was, it was a lower casualty toll than a normal day in Afghanistan, let alone an election on which both the insurgents and the government had staked their credibility. Officials of the International Security Assistance Force said they had counted only 100 attacks on election day nationwide, compared with 500 in the last presidential elections, in 2009.
Even before voting began, the authorities had closed 750 polling centers, just over 10 percent of the total, because of security concerns, and there were fears more would be closed on election day. Just how many will probably be a major issue in the aftermath of the voting, especially if the closures are seen as disenfranchising one ethnic group more than another. In preparation for the election, the Afghan government mobilized its entire military and police forces, some 350,000 in all, backed up by 53,000 NATO coalition troops — although the Americans and their allies stayed out of it, leaving Afghans for the first time entirely in charge of securing their own election.
Along with the threat of violence, the legacy of fraud from past elections cast a long shadow over Saturday’s voting. The authorities have gone to unusual extremes to try to guarantee an election at least credible enough to satisfy international donors, who have pledged to continue supporting Afghanistan with billions of dollars in aid, but want to be assured of an election free of the sort of widespread fraud that discredited the 2009 voting.
Underwritten by $100 million from the United Nations and foreign donors, this year’s election is a huge enterprise, especially given Afghanistan’s forbidding terrain. Some 3,200 donkeys were pressed into service to deliver ballots to remote mountain villages, which along with battalions of trucks and minibuses, reached 6,500 polling places in all. The American military pitched in with air transport of ballots to regional distribution centers and to difficult-to-reach provinces.
While many international election observers fled the country in the wake of attacks on foreigners, or found themselves confined to quarters in Kabul, years of expensive preparations and the training of an army of some 70,000 Afghan election observers were expected to compensate, according to Western diplomats and Afghan election officials.
“We have so many controls now — it’s going to be much safer this time,” said Noor Ahmad Noor, the spokesman for the Independent Election Commission.
The American ambassador, James B. Cunningham, called the election a “really historic opportunity for the people of Afghanistan to move forward with something we’ve been trying to create together with them for several years now.”
Despite an increasingly troubled relationship between the Americans and Mr. Karzai, who refused to sign a long-term security agreement with the United States, Mr. Cunningham said he had assurances from all the candidates that whoever won would sign the agreement upon taking office.
Many of the worst fears about this year’s election — that Mr. Karzai would cancel them on security grounds or try to amend the constitution to prolong his tenure in power — did not materialize.
Mr. Karzai pledged to stay out of the election campaign and not support any candidate, although there was no legal requirement for him to do so, and he forced his brother Qayum out of the race so that he would not be accused of trying to start a family dynasty.
While there were persistent reports that Mr. Karzai’s government was quietly shoring up Mr. Rassoul as a preferred candidate, there was also evidence of government support in various parts of the country for all three leading candidates.
The Taliban for their part vowed to derail the elections and punish anyone who voted — easily identifiable by the ink their fingers would be dipped in to confirm they had cast their votes. This time, election officials used two types of ink: invisible ultraviolet ink on one finger, and blue silver-nitrate ink on another. During the last election, it was discovered that nail polish remover could be used to remove the ink; this year, the solution is far more impermeable, meaning voters in troubled areas could be identified by insurgents for some three days.
That made the turnout in conflict areas all the more impressive. While in some provinces, such as Helmand, 72 of the 219 polling centers were closed because of security concerns, in others where there had been relatively little voting in 2009 many were opened.
In Kandahar Province, for instance, the police chief, Abdul Raziq, said 234 of 244 polling centers would be open on election day. That did not assure people would vote at all of them, however, as some open polling places were in such dangerous areas that participation seemed unlikely. And many places officially opened before the election might be closed on election day itself, officials conceded. How often that happened will be a closely watched bellwether of the validity of the results.
“Voting on this day will be a slap to the faces of the terrorists,” said Rahmatullah Nabil, the acting head of the National Directorate of Security, the Afghan domestic intelligence agency.“Voting on this day will be a slap to the faces of the terrorists,” said Rahmatullah Nabil, the acting head of the National Directorate of Security, the Afghan domestic intelligence agency.
But some were still too concerned to vote. Sensitive to concerns about potential fraud — more than a million ballots were thrown out in the 2009 presidential vote and then again in the 2010 parliamentary elections — the police were quick to report their efforts to crack down on Saturday.
“I won’t cast my vote because last night the Taliban came to us and warned us that we will be killed if we choose to vote,” said Parwiz, a 30-year-old villager from Bati Kot district in Nangarhar province, where at least 23 percent of the polling centers were closed, and many others were in dangerous areas. Among those arrested were four people in Khost who were caught with 1,067 voter registration cards. Several people, including an election official, were caught trying to stuff ballot boxes in Wardak Province.
Others were defiant. Election officials expressed confidence that redoubled safeguards, including computerized bar coding of ballots, ballot boxes and voter registration cards, as well as two kinds of indelible ink to mark voters’ fingers with (one invisible except under ultraviolet light, the other blue silver-nitrate), would help them detect other forms of fraud.
“Threats exist always and we are used to it,” said Jahanzaib, 28, a farmer from Mohmand Dara district in Nangarhar. “I will use my vote. That is my right and the only way to transfer power from President Karzai to someone else.” Early indications were cheering on many fronts.
Hajji Noor Mohammad, a farmer in Panjwai District, in Kandahar Province, was unable to vote in 2009 because there were so many Taliban around. He plans to vote this time, he said. “This has been the best and most incident-free election in Afghanistan’s modern history and it could set the precedence for a historic, peaceful transition of power in Afghanistan,” said Mohammad Fahim Sadeq, head of the Afghanistan National Participation Organization, an observer group.
“Today most people realize the importance of the election because the tribal elders were now telling us to use our vote and come out,” he said. In many places where voting was nearly impossible in 2009, the turnout was reported to be strong. One was Panjwai District, a once violent haven of the Taliban just outside of Kandahar City, where hundreds lined up to vote. “I left everything behind, my fears and my work, and came to use my vote,” said Hajji Mahbob, 60, a farmer. “I want change and a good government and I am asking the man I am going to elect as the next president to bring an end to the suffering of this war.”
Noting the Taliban threat to disrupt the election, Nicholas Haysom, the United Nations’ top election official here, said, “The failure to disrupt the elections will mean that they will have egg on their face after the elections.” Even where the Taliban did manage to strike, voters still turned out afterward. A bomb set off at a polling place in Mohammad Agha District of Logar province killed two voters and wounded two others, according to the district governor, Abdul Hamid. “Now people are going back to the polling station,” said a radio station owner there, Qazi Nasim Modaser.
More women than ever are on provincial ballots, and two are running for vice-president, marking the first time a woman has ever run for national office here. Insurgents set off a series of five blasts in the Shomali plain, just north of Kabul city, in the village of Qarabagh. “After the explosions, the polling stations reopened and people rushed to vote,” said Mohasmmad Sangar, 32, a used-car salesman there. “It was a great day today.”
At the women’s polling station in the Nadaria High School, in Kabul’s Qala-e-Fatullah neighborhood, among those lining up to vote was Parwash Naseri, 21. Although wearing the blue burqa that is traditional here, she was still willing to speak out through the privacy mesh covering her face. Nicholas Haysom, the United Nations’ top election official here, said: “We know that the Taliban have made a very explicit and express threat to disrupt it. The failure to disrupt the elections will mean that they will have egg on their face after the elections.”
She was voting for the first time for her children, and for women’s rights, she said, speaking in a whisper. While there were reports of disrupted voting in troubled places like Logar Province and neighboring Wardak, in Helmand Province in the south and Nangarhar Province in the east, at the same time voters were showing up in unexpectedly high numbers in other places, like Zabul, Uruzgan and Kandahar provinces in the south, and Kunar Province in the northeast, despite strong insurgent presences in those areas.
“I believe in the right of women to take part just as men do, to get themselves educated and to work.” In Uruzgan, election authorities had to open additional polling places to accommodate unexpected numbers, while in Daikundi they ran out of ballots in some remote districts and election authorities had to race new ones out to them. In northern Mazar-e-Sharif, voters were still lined up after dark.
Even in Kabul, a polling center in the well-to-do Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood ran out of ballots late in the day. “The turnout was too high in the morning,” said Muhammad Wazir, 25, a poll worker. “There were many more people than we expected.”
Early in the day, in a high school near the presidential palace, an emotional Mr. Karzai cast his own vote for his successor. “I, as a citizen of Afghanistan, did this with happiness and pride,” he said afterward.
Underwritten by $100 million from the United Nations and foreign donors, the election was a huge enterprise, stretching across extremely forbidding terrain. Some 3,200 donkeys were pressed into service to deliver ballots to remote mountain villages, along with battalions of trucks and minibuses to 6,500 polling places in all. The American military pitched in with air transport of ballots to four regional distribution centers, and to two difficult to reach provinces.
While many international observers left Afghanistan in the wake of attacks on foreigners, or found themselves confined to quarters in Kabul, years of expensive preparations and training of an army of some 70,000 Afghan election observers were expected to compensate, according to Western diplomats and Afghan election officials. “We have so many controls now, it’s going to be much safer this time,” said Noor Ahmad Noor, the spokesman for the Independent Election Commission.
The American ambassador, James B. Cunningham, called the elections a “really historic opportunity for the people of Afghanistan to move forward with something we’ve been trying to create together with them for several years now.”
Still up in the air is the question of whether an American troop force will remain in Afghanistan after 2014. Mr. Karzai’s refusal to sign a long-term security deal to allow that presence was a major point of tension between the American and Afghan governments. Each of the leading candidates has agreed to sign the deal once in office, though inauguration day may not take place until well into the year.
The election on Saturday was notable also for how many Afghan were taking part. More female candidates than ever before are on provincial ballots, and two are running for vice-president, the first time a woman was ever put up for national office here, which has generated a great deal of enthusiasm, especially in urban areas.
Shafi Khan, 37, turned up at a high school polling place in Kabul with his three young daughters in tow, decked out in colorful outfits. In a country where men and women are often separate, especially in Mr. Khan’s native Kandahar, having the girls by his side made a statement. “They need to understand the political process,” he said, entering the polling station with them clutching at his pants legs. “When they get bigger, they must take part.”
At the women’s polling station in the Nadaria High School, in Kabul’s Qala-e-Fatullah neighborhood, among those queuing to vote was a young mother, Parwash Naseri, 21. Although wearing the blue burqa that is traditional here, she was still willing to speak out through the privacy mesh covering her face.
She was voting, for the first time, for her children and for women’s rights, she said, speaking in a whisper. “I believe in the right of women to take part just as men do, to get themselves educated and to work.”