GARMSIR, AFGHANISTAN – No one got blown up. And a few hundred people actually showed up to vote. So, by that slim measure, election day here has to be considered a success. This town was packed with Taliban, just last year. The fear of additional militant attacks is never far off.
American and International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) commanders have put an enormous amount of energy into securing the elections – even though President Hamid Karzai is all-but-guaranteed to be re-elected, most observers believe. Mounting death tolls are beginning to undermine support for the Afghan war in several countries. A relatively calm election day gives leaders from Washington to Berlin to Kabul a sign of tangible progress. The next step is to bring the paper ballots to the provincial capitals, and then to Kabul. International forces will devote hundreds of helicopters and trucks to bring the ballots in. They've even secured 2,500 donkeys to haul in votes from Afghanistan's most isolated, hardest-to-traverse regions. It should take two to three weeks for the ballots to be finally counted, ISAF officials estimate.
At Garmsir's Central School, which combined 11 polling stations into a single election center, Afghan soldiers and cops frisked the turbaned men who came in twos and threes to cast their ballots. The schoolhouse was never packed with voters – just a slow, steady trickle. But several of those stations had recorded more than 130 ballots each, by the time this second election day since the 2001 American invasion was over.
One election worker at the Garmsir Central School, Abdul Nabi, was hoping for more at his station—maybe as many as 500 people. But concerns about Taliban reprisals kept people away. In the villages surrounding Garmsir, the militants put out the word, in night letters and through informants, that they would punish anyone caught with an ink-stained finger -- the tell-tale sign of election participation here. "If you paint your finger, we will cut your finger off," they warned, according to Nabi. Several other poll workers said they heard similar threats.
In 2006 and 2007, British troops couldn't leave their base a few hundred yards from the schoolhouse without coming under attack. In 2008, the Marines cleared the city center of militants. But further to the south, U.S. Marines are still getting into daily firefights with the Taliban.
That made Sher Muhammad's day… uneventful, to say the least. He sits by a gravel pile, in the corner of a bombed-out agricultural school. In front of him is a plastic blue card table, with a pad of legal-sized ballots. But not a single one of the ballots on Sher Muhammad's pad has been torn off; nobody has voted as his table, despite the teams of policemen and troops surrounding the place.
Other tables in this election center, devoted specifically to Kuchi nomads, are a little busier – one has four votes, another has ten.
It's still not enough to keep the dozen or so men anything better to do than mill around the rubble.
Not a single woman voted at either the Central School or the former agricultural installation. Nor did I see a single woman on streets today in Garmsir. I ask Muhammad where they are. He laughs at me. Women are "not allowed" to vote, Muhammad says. "Men are afraid to come. What do you expect from a woman?"
Muhammad has a square hat and a whisp of a black beard under his jaw line. He wears a powder blue overshirt, and a white bib with election boxes on the front. Muhammad volunteered to have his picture taken; he seems proud that he participated in the elections. But the manager of the station asked me not to publish any images of him or any other poll worker; the Taliban might use the pictures to target reprisals, he said.
So Sher Muhammad and Abdul Nabi went home, anonymous but unharmed in a mostly-uneventful election day. It was enough.
[PHOTO: Noah Shachtman]
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