Afghans Brave Violence To Vote

Afghans chose a legislature for the first time in decades on Sunday, embracing their newly recovered democratic rights and braving threats of terrorist attack to cast votes in schools, tents and mosques.

A wave of violence across Afghanistan killed 10 people, including a French commando, with militants using everything from roadside bombs to explosives hidden in a clock to subvert landmark elections Sunday, officials said, but there were no immediate signs of a spectacular attack feared from Taliban militants who vowed to disrupt the vote.

However, a handful of polling centers were closed temporarily because of gunfire and others opened late due to security fears, chief electoral officer Peter Erben said.

A French special forces soldier was killed and another seriously wounded when their vehicle struck a mine in southern Afghanistan, French officials said. Two rockets hit a U.N. warehouse in the Afghan capital, wounding a local staff member, while fierce fighting erupted in eastern Afghanistan, leaving three militants and two policemen dead and two U.S. troops wounded, officials said.

But Sunday was mostly about voting and making a difference. Officials predicted a massive turnout despite a Taliban call for a boycott.

"We are making history," President Hamid Karzai said as he cast his ballot. "It's the day of self-determination for the Afghan people. After 30 years of wars, interventions, occupations and misery, today Afghanistan is moving forward, making an economy, making political institutions."

Some 12.4 million Afghans were registered to vote for the national legislature and provincial assemblies at more than 6,000 polling stations, guarded by some 100,000 Afghan police and soldiers and 30,000 foreign troops.

"Today is a magnificent day for Afghanistan," said Ali Safar, 62, standing in line to vote in Kabul. "We want dignity, we want stability and peace. Thirty years of war and poverty is enough."

Afghans clutching voter identification cards filed into schools with lessons still scrawled on blackboards, or stepped over piles of shoes to cast their ballots in mosques. In remote areas, polling stations were set up in tents.

With nearly three-quarters of the populace illiterate, voting was slow as people waded through ballots up to seven pages long to find pictures of candidates or symbols that represent them. Some voters spent as much as 10 minutes behind cardboard screens marking ballots, some the size of posters.

Women, some in all-encompassing burqas, were segregated from men at many polling centers, entering through back doors and voting in separate rooms. At a Kuchi nomad voting center east of Kabul, an Associated Press Television News cameraman saw women handing their ballots to men to fill out as electoral officials looked on but did not intervene.

Each voter dipped a finger in indelible purple ink to prevent repeat voting.

The vote was seen as the last formal step toward democracy on a path set out after a U.S.-led force drove the Taliban from power in 2001, when they refused to hand over al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden following the Sept. 11 attacks.

Many people hoped the legislative polls would marginalize the insurgents and end a spiral of violence that started in 1979 when Soviet troops invaded, before a devastating civil war and the oppressive rule of the hard-line Taliban.

The Taliban said they would not attack civilians heading to the polls but warned them to stay away from areas where the militants might attack security forces and foreign troops.

Top U.N. envoy Jean Arnault said militants had failed to disrupt polling preparations despite violence during the six months leading up to the vote that killed 1,200 people, including seven candidates and four election workers.

A wave of assaults in the hours leading up to the vote left 17 militants, five policemen and the French soldier dead. Security forces said they thwarted four bombings, including an attempt to blow up a massive dam.

A U.S. military spokesman, Col. James Yonts, predicted "a massive number" of voters would turn out, telling The Associated Press that "this election will send a powerful message to the Taliban that their influence is waning."

In Pakistan, thousands of soldiers stood by near the border with Afghanistan. Militants based on the Pakistani side of the mountainous frontier are believed to cross into Afghanistan to stage attacks.