2010-09-06 10:18

An Afghan girl and her donkey walk past a wall with pictures of candidates for the parliamentary elections in Kabul September 5, 2010. [Agencies]

KABUL -- Afghanistan's Taliban said on Sunday they would attempt to disrupt elections this month and warned Afghans to boycott the vote, the first explicit threat against the poll by the hardline Islamists.

The threat came just a day after Afghan President Hamid Karzai 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 insurgents.

The September 18 parliamentary election is seen as a litmus test of stability in Afghanistan before US President Barack 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 the Taliban were ousted by US-backed Afghan forces 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 spokesman 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 told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location.

Security is a major concern ahead of the vote, with four candidates killed already in recent weeks and dozens of campaign workers wounded, according to the United Nations and government officials. Some of the attacks have been blamed on the Taliban.

Another candidate was wounded, and 10 of his campaign workers killed, in an air strike on Friday, Karzai has said, although NATO and US officials dispute his account.

Nader Nadery, chairman of the independent Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan, 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.

The Taliban launched about 130 attacks against last year's poll. They failed to disrupt it in much of the country, but in the Pashtun south turnout was low, observers were kept away and fraud was rampant.

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.

Polling Centres Closed

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.

The United Nations said in a statement on Sunday it agreed with that decision "to protect the security of voters, electoral workers and the secure and effective scrutiny of polling centres and voting procedures".