The Bush administration has begun suggesting that Afghanistan’s elections scheduled for June may have to be postponed because of security problems and the failure to register enough voters.
Administration officials said in recent days that security conditions remain dangerous or at least uncertain in a third of the country, hampering registration; only 8 percent of eligible Afghan voters have been enrolled. Among women, only 2 percent have registered.
The United Nations has said that at least 70 percent of eligible voters should be registered for the elections to be considered successful.
That leaves only four months to achieve a daunting goal at a time when registration workers are avoiding large swaths of the country considered unsafe.
Afghanistan has about 10.5 million eligible voters.
“I am reasonably confident that we can get enough voters registered and provide security–it won’t be perfect–that at least the presidential election can take place in June, or maybe July,” said an administration official.
But he added that security would have to improve to reach that goal, and that this might not happen.
President Hamid Karzai and the Afghan government are responsible for deciding whether the elections must be postponed, administration officials said. But the United States is expected to play a decisive role in advising the Karzai government.
Karzai is said to be determined to hold at least the presidential election on time, in part because he expects to win.
He also is said to be haunted by the memory that civil war erupted in the early 1990s when Burhanuddin Rabbani, a onetime anti-Russia guerrilla leader, refused to step down as president.
Under the constitution that was agreed upon last month, Afghanistan is supposed to try to schedule presidential and parliamentary elections in June.
The administration official said it is likely that the parliamentary elections, as opposed to presidential elections, would be postponed, possibly until next year. Beyond security concerns, there were difficulties in setting district boundaries, choosing candidates and organizing political parties for the parliamentary elections.
Many European and Japanese officials and private organizations involved in Afghanistan’s reconstruction reportedly are in favor of putting off the elections out of fear that chaotic voting may do more harm than good.
