Taliban call for Afghans to boycott runoff poll

Taliban fighters today warned Afghans not to take part in the war-wracked country’s forthcoming presidential runoff, threatening to launch a fresh wave of violence on polling day to stop them.

The warnings came on the first official day of campaigning for the November 7 vote.

The Taliban denounced the race between President Hamid Karzai and challenger Abdullah Abdullah as “a failed, American process” and said its fighters would “launch operations against the enemy and stop people from taking part”.

The statement said Taliban militants would also cut off key roads and highways, and warned that anyone who cast a ballot would “bear responsibility for their actions”.

Taliban fighters killed dozens of civilians during the first round on August 20, barraging several southern cities with rocket-fire and cutting off the ink-stained fingers of at least two people who cast ballots in the militant south.

Security fears are just one of the challenges election officials face as they scramble to organise a new election amid a swelling Taliban insurgency before the advent of winter, which will begin around much of country in the middle of November, isolating remote villages and cutting off roads with snow.

As campaigning began today, several senior Abdullah campaign officials accused the top three members of Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission of bias, saying they should be replaced to ensure the runoff was fair.

A spokesman for the commission, Noor Mohammad Noor, denied the allegations and said it was “impossible” to replace them.

Under intense US pressure, Karzai acknowledged last week that he fell short of the 50% threshold needed for victory in the August ballot after UN-backed auditors threw out nearly a third of his votes because of massive fraud.

The Afghan Independent Election Commission, dominated by Karzai supporters, is under huge pressure to avoid a repeat of the cheating, which discredited the government and threatened to undermine public support for the war in the US, which provides the bulk of the 100,000 Nato-led force.

In an effort to prevent fraud, Afghan authorities have said they will cut about 7,000 of the 24,000 polling stations that they set up for the August ballot. Some of those stations were in areas too dangerous to protect. Others never opened, enabling corrupt officials to stuff the ballot boxes with impunity.