On election day, a pack of bone-thin, restless dogs wandered into the main polling center in Sheikhabad, a town in Afghanistan’s Wardak Province. A pair of Afghan policemen tried to chase them away, but the determined bunch kept returning, looking for a shady redoubt from the morning sun. Eventually the police relented, and the dogs settled down for a nap.
The canines were the only visitors there for hours—not a single person had come to vote. On the day of Afghanistan’s parliamentary elections, meant to determine the makeup of one of the country’s few remaining independent government institutions, most of Wardak’s polling centers were empty, filled only with policemen and corrupt government officials.
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Saydabad, Afghanistan–When campaign aide Qais showed up at a polling center in the troubled province of Wardak Saturday morning, he found that guards would not allow him to enter. When he tried to peer through the windows, he found that workers had erected huge cardboard sheets to block the view.
Inside, election workers were busy stuffing ballots on behalf of a candidate named Hajji Wahedullah Kalimzai. Although only about 20 men had come to vote thus far, hundreds of ballots were being marked in favor of Mr. Kalimzai.
It was a scene repeated throughout the province. The elections in Wardak were marred by widescale fraud, violence, and an extremely low turnout, casting doubt on the legitimacy of the new class of lawmakers that will represent the province.
“There were almost no elections in Wardak,” said Ghulam Hassan, a local elder. “The votes were stolen right in front of our eyes.”
The turn of events in Wardak likely represents a larger trend in a number of restive areas throughout Afghanistan, where Taliban threats limit the ability of election monitoring teams to visit many polling centers.
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Kabul, Afghanistan —Daud Niazi, a candidate in Afghanistan’s parliamentary elections on Saturday, was returning from a campaign event in his native Laghman Province when a group of gunmen suddenly appeared by the roadside. They forced his campaign caravan to a halt, robbed the passengers, and then ordered the vehicles to get moving.
As the convoy pulled away, the gunmen opened fire, shattering windshields, killing Mr. Niazi’s cousin, and leaving others wounded. The incident was the latest in a series of attacks against candidates. Many of the attacks are attributed to the Taliban.
But it wasn’t insurgents that were behind this grisly attack, it was a rival candidate, according to government officials. Afghanistan’s contentious campaign season, which came to a close this week ahead of Saturday’s polls, was marked as much by intercandidate violence and complex rivalries as it was by Taliban intimidation.
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Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan–Lashkar Gah is typical of the conservative, war-battered towns of southern Afghanistan: few women on the streets, the constant drone of helicopters overhead, concrete blast barriers everywhere.
Yet here in the provincial capital of Helmand Province, where NATO forces just waged its biggest offensives against the Taliban in nine years, one structure near the town’s center stands as a testament to more normal times. Locals are reopening the Lashkar Gah Cinema Hall, the only movie theater in all of southern Afghanistan. For years it sat damaged by numerous wars and shuttered by Islamic extremism. Its resurrection is hoped to bring a rebirth of artistic expression in this restive corner of the country.
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It was late November, 2001, and the Taliban were on the run everywhere in Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance had captured Kabul and much of the rest of the country; only parts of the southwest—including the province of Helmand, remained in the Taliban’s hands. In Marjah, a quiet market town near the Helmand desert, the dying Taliban were making a last stand against a local tribal commander named Abdur Rahman Jan. The battle lasted for nearly two days, and many reinforcements came from the surrounding areas. But the Taliban, beleaguered around the country and bereft of public support, soon succumbed; Jan’s force overran Marjah and the Taliban fled in disgrace.
Jan went on to become Helmand’s police chief under the new government of Hamid Karzai. His close friend Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, a strongman with deep pockets and roots in the area, became the governor. The two quickly populated the seats of local government with their friends, family members and those from their tribes. The local government revenues became part of their personal piggy bank, locals say, and they became heavily involved in the opium business. They marginalized other tribes, destroyed the poppy fields of rivals, took bribes and kickbacks for government contracts and filled the ranks of the police with hated former mujahedeen commanders. One resident of Marjah told me, “The police were the biggest criminals. We were more afraid of them than of anyone else.”
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KABUL–Pakistan has arrested nearly half of the Afghanistan Taliban’s leadership in recent days, Pakistani officials told the Monitor Wednesday, dealing what could be a crucial blow to the insurgent movement.
In total, seven of the insurgent group’s 15-member leadership council, thought to be based in Quetta, Pakistan, including the head of military operations, have been apprehended in the past week, according to Pakistani intelligence officials.
Western and Pakistani media had previously reported the arrest of three of the 15, but this is the first confirmation of the wider scale of the Pakistan crackdown on the Taliban leadership, something the US has sought.
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One quiet, wintry night last year in the eastern Afghan town of Khost, a young government employee named Ismatullah simply vanished. He had last been seen in the town’s bazaar with a group of friends. Family members scoured Khost’s dusty streets for days. Village elders contacted Taliban commanders in the area who were wont to kidnap government workers, but they had never heard of the young man. Even the governor got involved, ordering his police to round up nettlesome criminal gangs that sometimes preyed on young bazaargoers for ransom.
But the hunt turned up nothing. Spring and summer came and went with no sign of Ismatullah. Then one day, long after the police and village elders had abandoned their search, a courier delivered a neat handwritten note on Red Cross stationery to the family. In it, Ismatullah informed them that he was in Bagram, an American prison more than 200 miles away. US forces had picked him up while he was on his way home from the bazaar, the terse letter stated, and he didn’t know when he would be freed.
In the past few years Pashtun villagers in Afghanistan’s rugged heartland have begun to lose faith in the American project. Many of them can point to the precise moment of this transformation, and it usually took place in the dead of night, when most of the country was fast asleep. In its attempt to stamp out the growing Taliban insurgency and Al Qaeda, the US military has been arresting suspects and sending them to one of a number of secret detention areas on military bases, often on the slightest suspicion and without the knowledge of their families. These night raids have become even more feared and hated in Afghanistan than coalition airstrikes. The raids and detentions, little known or understood outside the Pashtun villages, have been turning Afghans against the very forces many of them greeted as liberators just a few years ago.
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By Anand Gopal and Joe Lauria
KABUL — President Hamid Karzai failed to win a decisive majority in Afghanistan’s election, an official familiar with the ballot counting said, a development that has the two top candidates stepping up power-sharing talks to avoid a protracted runoff.
Results of an audit of suspect votes from the August polls are expected Saturday, Afghan authorities said. Investigators at the U.N.-backed Afghan Electoral Complaints Commission are expected to discard enough votes as fraudulent to trigger a runoff between Mr. Karzai and lead challenger Abdullah Abdullah in coming weeks.
According to Afghan and Western officials in Kabul, Mr. Karzai and Dr. Abdullah are exploring a deal to end the country’s political crisis by forgoing a second round and crafting a power-sharing arrangement.
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By Anand Gopal and Yochi Dreazen
KABUL — An American airstrike on militants in northern Afghanistan killed an unknown number of local villagers, dealing a fresh blow to the U.S. campaign and adding fresh political pressure on NATO members struggling to defend an increasingly unpopular war.
The strike on a pair of hijacked fuel trucks in Kunduz Province sparked an immediate investigation by U.S and Afghan officials. It underscored the American military’s continuing struggle to prevent civilian deaths, just days after guidelines were issued to troops reminding them of that responsibility.
Two Western military officials acknowledged in interviews that early indications suggested significant numbers of civilians had died in the attack, though the number hasn’t been determined. Afghan officials said that up to 90 people died in the attack, including a large number of villagers who had been trying to siphon away fuel from the stalled trucks.
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KABUL — The Taliban are attempting to exact revenge on Afghan voters and disrupt the ballot count — part of a campaign to exploit the political uncertainty after last week’s presidential election and try to undermine the results.
Since the Aug. 20 election, Taliban fighters have launched nearly a dozen attacks. They have severed the fingers of voters, stolen ballot boxes, and murdered government officials. Afghan police have been reluctant to move into Taliban-controlled areas to quell the violence.
In Wardak province, west of Kabul, local officials say the insurgents have been setting up checkpoints to look for voters who are easily identifiable by the blue ink marks on their fingertips. In one such incident in Saydabad district, the Taliban killed three voters, according to witnesses. Also in Wardak, insurgents chopped off the fingers of four people who had voted at the provincial capital, according to local tribal elder Maualem Ghulab. Human-rights officials reported a similar attack in Kandahar shortly after the election.
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