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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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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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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KABUL — Reports of fraud and intimidation from election-monitoring groups are mounting, undermining the legitimacy of Afghanistan’s presidential vote and posing a challenge for the U.S. and its Western allies, who initially declared the vote a success.
A linchpin of the international community’s strategy here, Thursday’s election was supposed to shore up the credibility of the Western-backed Afghan government threatened by a spreading Taliban insurgency. Rolling back Taliban advances and reinvigorating Afghanistan’s development are the key goals of President Barack Obama’s administration, which has poured tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops into the country in recent months.
But now, as rivals of President Hamid Karzai allege widespread ballot-stuffing in his favor, the poll may have produced some unintended consequences. Allegations of fraud could end up eroding Afghanistan’s stability, fracturing the part of the Afghan society that is opposed to the Taliban — and making it even more difficult to contain the insurgency, say those tracking the election.
“The Obama administration’s policy hinges on whether a legitimate leader emerges from this election,” says Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based think tank, who observed the Afghan vote. “Without a legitimate civilian leadership here you’ll have a shaky foundation for the whole policy.”
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QALA CHA, Afghanistan — Shershad Muhammad almost didn’t get to vote.
As the 60-year-old baker pedaled his bike toward a polling station in this village on Kabul’s outskirts early Thursday, a group of police officers forced him to dismount, tackled him and nearly arrested him. His offense: carrying a large black bag. It was full of bread to give to election workers, but anxious police mistook the bag for a bomb.
“I decided to give the bread to the police officers instead, and they were happy and let me go,” he said.
Afghans went to the polls for their second presidential election with their country on edge. Those who exercised their democratic rights had to defy Taliban threats and hew closely to the social mores of this conservative Islamic country, which, for one, dictate when and how females leave their homes.
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By Matthew Rosenberg, Anand Gopal and Yochi Dreazen
KABUL — Amid dozens of election-day Taliban attacks that claimed 26 lives, Afghans voted for president Thursday — but reports of low turnout and fraud made it unclear whether bombs or ballots would ultimately emerge the day’s victor.
Counting Ballots
Taliban militants had stepped up attacks for a week and threatened to target polling places with suicide squads to disrupt the vote and force voters to stay home. In the end they managed 73 attacks across the nation amid massive security efforts. The dead included a U.S. soldier and a British soldier.
U.S. and Afghan officials portrayed the day as positive because international troops were never called in to maintain security and there were no major attacks; many of the incidents caused little harm. Still, the violence was expected to result in voter turnout clearly below the 70% registered in the last election five years ago.
Election officials in a number of provinces reported turnout only a fraction that high, and in Taliban strongholds voters reported many polling stations were shuttered. “Everything is closed,” said lawmaker Roshanak Wardak by telephone from the southern province of Wardak. “Right now, I am hiding in my house. There are rockets and explosions outside.”
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Commission chief struggles to keep the process honest; ‘You do the best given the circumstances.’
KABUL — Afghanistan’s presidential election next week is proving to be a complicated exercise in democracy. A raging insurgency threatens to close voting centers. Some of the 38 candidates maintain ties to armed militias. Others have threatened violence if they lose. And reports of widespread fraud endanger the poll’s credibility.
It is Grant Kippen’s job to keep the process honest. Mr. Kippen heads the Electoral Complaints Commission, an independent body given the task of receiving complaints about candidates, auditing the process for fraud, and, when necessary, imposing sanctions on violators to try to ensure the vote is as credible as possible.
“It’s a challenge, an enormous challenge,” Mr. Kippen says. “We expect thousands of complaints and allegations by Election Day. You do your best given the circumstances.”
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The unpopular Afghan President’s talent for deal-making and conciliation are expected to pave way for another 5-year term.
By Matthew Rosenberg and Anand Gopal
KABUL — When the U.S. and its allies first anointed Hamid Karzai as Afghanistan’s president nearly eight years ago, he was seen at home and abroad as an adept politician uniquely suited to forge compromises among the country’s warring factions.
As Afghanistan has deteriorated, so has Mr. Karzai’s reputation. The same traits that once earned him praise are now criticized as signs of a mercurial and vacillating leader. He publicly denounces the U.S. presence. He is widely blamed for all that ails Afghanistan: the rampant corruption, the flourishing opium trade, the Taliban’s resurgence. And, until he began campaigning for re-election when the nation goes to the polls Aug. 20, he rarely ventured beyond the confines of his palace. At a rally on Friday he made only a brief appearance, speaking for about six minutes.
Yet the deeply unpopular Mr. Karzai, 51 years old, is heavily favored to win another five-year term. The reason, according to allies, foes and diplomats: Despite his many shortcomings, Mr. Karzai has become a passive strongman, a leader whose deal-making touch and conciliatory instincts have allowed him to sideline rivals or turn them into allies. That is expected to translate into victory at the polls, in a system in which voters tend to follow their traditional and ethnic leaders.
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