Afghans to vote for parliament amid security fears

KABUL - Afghans will go to the polls on September 18 to complete the last step in an international plan to restore democratic government after 25 years of conflict but security worries are mounting on a surge of violence.

The U.N.-backed vote will determine the parliament President Hamid Karzai will have to work with and set the country's political landscape for years.

Powerful leaders of factions that defeated the Soviets in the 1980s and battled each other in the 1990s are competing for votes against thousands of independent candidates, and many Afghans are likely to reject politics of the gun, analysts say.

The delayed elections for a lower house of parliament and provincial councils come nearly a year after Karzai won a five-year term, and nearly four years after the Taliban were ousted by U.S. and opposition forces.

"This election means the completion of the restoration of a legitimate and representative government for Afghanistan," said EU special representative Francesc Vendrell.

"It is particularly important because part of the reason for the continuous fighting in Afghanistan has been the lack of legitimacy of successive governments and that, in turn, has facilitated foreign interference," he told Reuters.

A tide of violence and intimidation has preceded the poll but the government says its forces, backed by 20,000 U.S. troops and 10,000 NATO-led peacekeepers, can ensure smooth voting.

The Taliban have condemned the elections and stepped up attacks while U.S. forces have intensified their hunt for militants.

More than 1,000 people have been killed this year including 49 U.S. soldiers. But the violence has been largely confined to the south and east and the joint U.N.-Afghan election commission is cautiously hopeful.

Lottery

The big question is whether the old political forces will become the dominant players in parliament and challenge Karzai.

"You have Afghanistan's past fighting with its present," said a Western diplomat. "It's the individuals, the independents, against the parties, the past."

Among the candidates are leaders of several of the mujahideen, or holy warrior, factions that helped the United States rout the Taliban for sheltering Osama bin Laden.

Mujahideen leaders, many from ethnic minorities, took main ministries after the Taliban's fall, but Karzai has slowly replaced them with Western-leaning technocrats, mostly from his Pashtun community, the biggest ethnic group.

Karzai has called for people to shun parties and vote for honest candidates who put the country first.

The government has also chosen an electoral system under which all stand as independents, not party members, and voters get one vote even though there is more than one representative from each constituency.

The International Crisis Group think-tank calls it a lottery.

"It is very hard to predict what kind of parliament will emerge," said another diplomat in Kabul.

"There's a very big chance of the parliament being highly fragmented, a parliament in which the president would have to constantly buy his way and find different majorities on every issue," he said.

But the factions could suffer a significant loss of power if public antipathy toward them is translated into votes, said Kabul University professor Wadir Safi.

If the warlord factions do well, parliament would be "full of contradictions between themselves and problems with the government," Safi said.

Voters will also elect a council in their province that will choose a third of members of an upper house of parliament.

- REUTERS