[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.]
By Rod Nordland, Azam Ahmed and Matthew Rosenberg
 |
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
|
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
high numbers to choose a new president and provincial councils that polling
hours were extended nationwide, in a triumph of determination over
intimidation.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
“The enemies of Afghanistan have been defeated,” he declared.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Both Mr. Ghani and Mr.
Abdullah praised the vote. “A proud day for a proud nation,” Mr. Ghani said.
Still, a shortage of
ballots at polling places was widespread across the country by midday Saturday,
and some voters were in line when polls closed.
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.
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 three scattered
attacks on polling places, four voters were reported killed. Two rockets fired
randomly into the city of Jalalabad wounded eight civilians. One border
policeman, in southern Kandahar Province, and another policeman in remote
western Farah Province were confirmed killed in Taliban attacks, according to
preliminary reports.
Bad as all that was, it
was a lower casualty toll than on a normal day in Afghanistan, let alone an
election on which both the insurgents and the government had staked their
credibility. Interior Minister Umar Daudzai said there were 140 attacks
nationwide on Saturday, compared with 500 attacks recorded by the American
military in 2009.
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.
“Voting on this day
will be a slap in the faces of the terrorists,” said Rahmatullah Nabil, the
acting head of the National Directorate of Security, the Afghan domestic
intelligence agency.
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.
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.
“This has been the best
and most incident-free election in Afghanistan’s modern history and it could
set the precedent for a historic, peaceful transition of power in Afghanistan,”
said Mohammad Fahim Sadeq, head of the Afghanistan National Participation
Organization, an observer group.
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
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.”
Even where the Taliban
did manage to strike, voters still turned out afterward. A bomb set off at a
polling place in the Mohammad Agha district of Logar Province killed two voters
and wounded two others, according to the district governor, Abdul Hamid. “The
explosion dispersed the voters who were holding their voting cards and waiting
to vote,” said Zalmai Stanakzai, a car repair shop owner who was there. “Some
of us left, the others stayed. I was concerned about our safety, but we
considered voting our duty.”
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.”
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.”
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.
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-i-Sharif,
voters were still lined up after dark.
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.
Though 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 women 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.
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 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.”
Reporting was
contributed by Jawad Sukhanyar and Habib Zahori from Kabul, Farooq Jan Mangal
from Khost, Khalid Alokozai from Jalalabad, and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar.