Afghanistan's future? Too early to tell

Violent attacks by the Taliban in Kabul early today has meant a low voter turnout in the first hours of voting in the Afghan elections.

There are reports of at least five bombings, a rocket attack and a gun battle between Afghan army and police and Taliban militants. At least a dozen polling booths in the capital are closed as a result, according to election monitors.

As GlobalPost correspondents Jean MacKenzie in Kabul and Kimberly Johnson in Helmand Province continue their reporting from the field, it is still too early to tell where these elections are headed.

But the early indications, according to our correspondents and coverage by the BBC and NPR, are that voter turnout is low in the capital and in the South and East, where the Taliban has its greatest influence.

In Kandahar, the Taliban controls 13 of the 17 districts, according to Sarah Chayes, an adviser to commander of US troops in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal. Chayes has lived in Afghanistan for many years as a journalist and aid worker and has a lot of what we at GlobalPost call “groundtruth.”

She says that the Taliban’s campaign of intimidation and fear has had considerable affect.

People fear that the ink on their fingers from voting, which is meant to reduce voter fraud, is “a death warrant,” as she put it.

“People are afraid,” she added, speaking on a crackling phone line from Kandahar this morning when she joined me on PRI’s The Takeaway with host John Hockenberry.

The low voter turnout is widely seen to increase the chances of Abdullah Abdullah, the leading challenger to the incumbent President Hamid Karzai, succeeding in securing a run-off election.

Abdullah Abdullah, whose parents are a mix of Tajik and Pashtun ethnic backgrounds, was a loyal member of Commander Massoud’s Northern Alliance which has its roots and greatest following in the North and West, where voter turnout is reported to be strong and there are little reports of election violence.

The stress cracks in this election showed even before the polls opened.

The Afghan media, which has grown to be vibrant and done a good and fair job covering the colorful cast of characters who are in the race, has been restricted by a jittery central government in its coverage of violence leading up to the race.

Several Afghan journalists have been roughed up and arrested for doing their jobs in covering the spate of bombings and rocket attacks that have occurred in the days before the election and in recent hours as voters go to the polls.

The government of Karzai – and whoever emerges to serve as the next president -- needs to know that they can’t make the country safer by covering up the bad news, and cracking down on the media is not a sign of strength but of weakness in a nascent democracy.

http://www.globalpost.com/notebook/afghanistan/090820/afghanistans-future-early-tell