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| Afghanistan |
| Taliban vow to disrupt elections in Afghanistan |
| 2010-09-06 |
| [Pak Daily Times] The Taliban said on Sunday they would attempt to disrupt elections this month and warned the Afghans to boycott the vote, the first explicit threat against the poll by them. The threat came just a day after Afghanistan's Caped President Hamid Maybe I'll join the TalibanKarzai said he would soon announce members of a peace council to pursue talks with the Taliban, another step in his plan for reconciliation with the terrorists. The September 18 parliamentary election is seen as a litmus test of stability in Afghanistan before US President Barack B.O.Obama conducts a war strategy review in December that will examine the pace and scale of US troop withdrawals from July 2011. Despite the presence of almost 150,000 foreign troops, violence is at its worst across Afghanistan since US-backed Afghan forces ousted the Taliban in late 2001. "This (poll) is a foreign process for the sake of further occupation of Afghanistan and we are asking the Afghan nation to boycott it," Taliban front man Zabihullah Mujahid said. "We are against it and will try with the best of our ability to block it. Our first targets will be the foreign forces and next the Afghan ones," he said. Security is a major concern ahead of the vote, with four candidates killed already in recent weeks and dozens of campaign workers maimed, according to the United Nations, aka the Oyster Bay Chowder and Marching Society and government officials. Some of the attacks have been blamed on the Taliban. Another candidate was maimed, and 10 of his campaign workers were killed, in an airstrike on Friday, Karzai has said, although NATO and US officials dispute his account. The independent Election Foundation of Afghanistan Free and Fair Chairman Nader Nadery said the threat was worrying because it could lead to poor voter turnout in the ethnic Pashtun belt in the south, where the Taliban are strongest. "The people know that when the Taliban warn, they deliver on those warnings, and that prevents people from engaging very actively," Nadery said. Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister who came second behind Karzai last year, said he was worried about security. "Not only has it not improved in the last few months, it has deteriorated," Abdullah told a news conference in Kabul. According to Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission (IEC), 938 out of a planned 6,835 polling centres will not open on election day because of security fears. Graft and cronyism are also major concerns ahead of the vote after last year's fraud-marred presidential election, in which a third of votes for Karzai were thrown out as fake. |
| Posted by:Fred |