Afghans Lining Up to Vote in Parliamentary Elections

Despite a last-minute surge in attacks near Kabul, Afghans began voting today in an election that is to complete the transition to democracy begun with the toppling of the Taliban regime almost four years ago.

Less than half an hour after polls opened at 6 a.m., more than 150 men were lined up to vote at a Kabul mosque. On the other side of the compound, about 30 women, many of them wearing burkas, sat on the ground waiting their turn to vote in the sex-segregated polling station.

In a rare attack Saturday on the edge of the capital, suspected Taliban guerrillas ambushed and killed a district police chief and two officers. In a separate attack, insurgents hit a police car with a rocket-propelled grenade on the highway linking Kabul to the southern city of Kandahar. The police escaped, but seven suspected militants were killed in a firefight.

Authorities said they also foiled a plot to blow up a dam in the southern province of Helmand, one of several regions where U.S. and Afghan forces continue to battle Taliban guerrillas and their allies.

At least seven candidates and four election workers were killed in the weeks before today’s vote, and the Taliban warned of more attacks today. Similar threats failed to stop presidential elections last October, when voters elected Hamid Karzai.

“There is no absolute security, as we all know, but Afghans must be brave,” said Peter Erben, chief operations officer for the U.N.-Afghan election commission. He said some polling stations might not open because of security problems.

Today’s vote is the last major step in a transition to democracy that began with an agreement among Afghan leaders at a summit near Bonn in December 2001, as U.S. and allied Afghan forces fought to remove the Taliban.

More than 12 million Afghans are registered to vote for the 249-member lower house of the National Assembly, called the Wolesi Jirga, or House of the People. They also cast ballots for representatives to 34 provincial councils. More than 2,700 candidates are running for the assembly. More than 3,000 are candidates for the provincial councils.

A total of 76 parties have candidates in the election. Afghan analysts say no party or alliance is expected to win enough seats to dominate the House of the People. Instead, bitter enemies including communists, former Taliban members and former guerrilla fighters are likely to squabble with one another and Karzai’s government.

The provincial councils and district councils will choose two-thirds of the members of the upper house, called the Meshrano Jirga, or House of Elders. Karzai will appoint a third of the upper house.

“I’m going to vote for the person who doesn’t sell out our country to others, and who brings an end to the war,” said snuff trader Ghulam Sarwar, 24. Like most voters interviewed Saturday in Kabul, Sarwar kept the name of his preferred candidate secret, but did say he was a relative.

Election workers won’t start tallying the votes until Tuesday, after thousands of ballot boxes are delivered to regional counting centers. Many must be brought from remote mountains and through vast areas of Afghanistan that are still at war.

Final results are not expected until two weeks later.

The wealth of choices has left many Afghan voters confused, and several of those interviewed said they didn’t plan to vote.

Mohammed Essa, 35, works seven days a week, from 3 a.m. till 7 p.m., shoveling cement and sand to feed Kabul’s construction boom. He said that he didn’t have time to get a voter registration card, and that if he had registered, his vote would have gone to a candidate selected by village elders.

“All of these candidates are thieves and murderers,” interrupted cement trader Mohammed Akbar, 37. But then he named one candidate who he said “hasn’t sucked our blood.” It was Bashar Dost, a former planning minister in Karzai’s government.

Dost won the respect of many Afghans this year by resigning when Karzai overruled his order to expel nongovernmental aid groups the minister called a waste of money.

Dost’s star rose even higher when he left his office in a taxi instead of a heavily armed minister’s motorcade.

“Many people will vote for Dost because we like his image and respect him,” Akbar said.

No party names appear on the ballots. To help millions of illiterate voters find their preferred candidates, election organizers assigned them symbols chosen by lottery. But those left some voters even more confused.

In Kabul, where 390 candidates’ names fill a seven-page ballot the size of a tabloid newspaper, one candidate’s symbol is a pair of glasses, while another’s is two pairs of glasses. A third is three pairs of glasses. Some voters think candidates chose symbols to reflect their policies, which they found baffling when candidates campaigned with symbols such as mushrooms, a stork and three sailboats.

Younis Qanooni, who ran a distant second to Karzai in last year’s presidential election, drew the symbol of a television set, sparking a rumor that, if elected, he would deliver free cable to all Afghan homes.

“I have lost my way in trying to choose a candidate because I don’t know any of them and it’s difficult to understand and recognize them,” said Khalid Rukhshan, 20, who threw his voting card in the garbage.

Women, who make up 12% of the candidates and almost 42% of the voters, have played a bigger role than in the presidential election. Under the constitution, 68 seats in the House of the People are reserved for women. That will raise Afghanistan to the 20th position in the world in women’s representation in parliament, according to the United Nations.

Under the Taliban regime, Afghan women were prevented from working in most jobs, couldn’t leave the house unless escorted by a male relative, and faced severe beatings if they did not cover themselves head to toe.

Sameena Faqiri said she planned to vote for a man who promised to improve the economy and end foreign interference.

“I’ll vote for somebody who would kick all these invaders out of our country and make it independent from the U.S., Germany, Canada and any other country,” said Faqiri, 18. “We are not going to benefit from them at all.”