With Violence Muted, Afghans Go to Polls For Historic Election

Militants Fail to Follow Through on Threats

KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 18 -- Hundreds of thousands of citizens flocked to schools, mosques and tents across Afghanistan on Sunday to vote in this war-weary nation's first legislative elections since 1969, as militants largely failed to follow through on threats to disrupt the balloting with violence.

The elections marked the final phase of an international plan, drawn up after the ouster of the extremist Taliban government in 2001, to transform Afghanistan into a stable democracy.

President Hamid Karzai summed up the sense of pride expressed by many of his countrymen throughout the day as he cast his ballot before television cameras.

"We are making history," he said. "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."

However, several polling centers in the capital, Kabul, and in rural areas south of the city were almost deserted by noon. Some observer organizations predicted that the turnout nationwide would prove far lower than the 70 percent of voters who showed up to vote in October in Afghanistan's first democratic presidential election.

"The low turnout was very obvious in districts all over the country," said Nader Nadery, chairman of the Free and Fair Elections Foundation of Afghanistan, which deployed about 7,000 monitors to the roughly 6,300 polling centers. Election officials said they would not be able to determine how many of the 12.5 million registered voters had participated until Monday.

Despite the overall sense of calm, scattered violence by suspected Taliban insurgents left about a dozen people dead by the end of the day -- including a French soldier killed by a roadside bomb in the southern province of Kandahar, four civilians killed in a rocket attack in the eastern province of Konar, and three Taliban fighters and two Afghan police officers killed in a battle in the southeastern province of Khost, according to Afghan and international officials.

At least 19 polling centers were attacked with rockets or small arms fire, although no one was killed. A rocket hit a U.N. compound in Kabul, slightly injuring one person.

Suspected Taliban militants have mounted a string of deadly attacks since spring across the south and east, killing hundreds of civilians, including seven candidates and four campaign workers.

A purported spokesman for the Taliban, Abdul Latif Hakimi, had claimed the militia would not attack polling stations on election day. But he had threatened violence against other targets and warned Afghans not to participate in the vote.

Some voters in the village of Musahy, in a narrow, verdant valley a bumpy 12-mile drive south of Kabul, appeared to heed that advice Sunday. On Saturday, gunmen had opened fire on a police convoy crossing a nearby bridge, killing five policemen.

Two hours after the polls opened, only a trickle of voters had passed through the village school that served as the voting center.