Tensions High Before Landmark Afghan Vote

KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghanistan braced Friday for Sunday's landmark parliamentary and provincial elections — its first in more than three decades — amid Taliban threats, a ballot so crowded it resembles a phone book, and low expected turnout in the violent south and east.

About 12.4 million Afghans are registered to vote, choosing from nearly 5,800 candidates for the 249-seat Wolesi Jirga, the lower house of parliament, and provincial councils. In Kabul province alone the ballot lists more than 400 names across seven oversized pages.

Remnants of the Taliban have vowed to disrupt the vote and have stepped up attacks in recent weeks, killing candidates, election workers and clerics who urged participation. More than 1,000 people have died in violence this year, the bloodiest since the hard-line regime fell in late 2001.

"The enemy is trying to frighten the people into staying home," said the chairman of the joint U.N.-Afghan election commission. "We expect intimidation, but we do not expect them to stop the election."

U.S. and NATO troops have fanned out across the provinces while Afghan police guard the country's 26,000 polling stations. Ballots in remote districts are being delivered the old-fashioned way — by donkey and horse caravan over mountain passes.

The vote completes the political blueprint laid out at the 2001 Bonn conference, following last October's presidential election that Hamid Karzai won by a wide margin. Karzai has urged a large turnout, calling the ballot a blow against "the enemies of Afghanistan."

Complicating the picture is the country's booming opium economy, which supplies nearly 90 percent of the world's heroin and which diplomats say buys influence for drug lords on some candidate lists.

Ballot counting will take days. Each provincial council's top woman vote-getter is guaranteed a seat, part of a quota reserving roughly a quarter of parliament for women — itself a revolution in a country where the Taliban once barred girls from school.

Election officials say the biggest threat may not be violence but confusion: with no voter registration by party, many ballots show dozens of nearly identical names distinguished only by tiny pictorial symbols.

The U.N. has certified some 160,000 domestic observers, and international monitors, while thin on the ground, say the vote need only be credible, not perfect.