Saturday 17 September

We travel to the district seat across scrub-covered desert punctuated by nomads’ tents. Our arrival catches the local NGO staff with whom we will stay a little off-guard. Despite the inconvenience, they generously share with us a few of their red beans and rice, while politely refusing to partake of our own bizarre selection of Iranian feta, Bran Flakes, and tinned tuna. It looks like it may be a hungry few days.

Sunday 18 September – election-day

5:30am: A couple of weeks ago concerns over the time needed to navigate the ballots prompted a change in opening time for polling stations to 6am – 4pm. On our first visit to one, the guard is polite but no more as he opens the gate for us; we drive out, dazed, un-fed and more importantly without having taken any tea.

6:20am: After some initial confusion, the polling stations in the local high school are open, and voters begin being processed in a fair semblance of the procedures. Crucial in the absence of a voters’ register is the inking of fingers.

1:00pm: The only written complaint is from candidate representatives saying that the ballot is too complex for many voters, and – as the rules dictate – polling staff will assist only the blind and seriously infirm. While it is a commonplace for international election organisers to claim that theirs are the most complex ever attempted, Afghanistan’s amalgam of sixty-nine separate races has a pretty fair claim among the ten or so post-conflict polls I’ve observed.

Six months ago, against advice from many quarters, the Afghan government chose to adopt a system rarely used outside Vanuatu – the single non-transferable vote (SNTV). SNTV allows voters to cast a vote for just one candidate to multi-member provincial constituencies, and has important practical and political consequences.

The practical is a ballot with hundreds of candidates, several pages long, and featuring tiny photographs and candidate symbols which the largely illiterate population must decipher. The political – in line with the ambitions of the present government in Kabul – is the virtual elimination of parties as a way to organise voters; although to be fair, the population also harbours a deep suspicion of parties stemming from the vicious destruction wrought by competing mujahideen factions in the early 1990s.

4:00pm: We’ve been interviewing voters, and despite intermittent reports of candidate agents and staff directing people how to vote, all seem convinced that the ballot is secret, surely the bedrock of this exercise. They are considerably less clear about what a parliament is for, but I reflect that perhaps this can wait until the next opportunity to pass judgment. After all, even among the government and the international democratisers of Kabul little is known yet about the future workings of the parliament and its weak provincial cousins.

The polling comes to a quiet end – almost everyone who wants to has been through by one-o’clock prayers, and the village polling staff are bored.

Monday 19 September

We return to the only chaikhana (teahouse) in town for lunch. Some of the national police who have been trucked in for security arrive, and we discover we’ve taken the last of the grizzled joints that pass for meat – as I can’t really face the rest of mine, I pass it to them and we talk. They are third-year students from the police academy in Kabul, and Nazir remarks to me how different these educated young men are in their manner and sense of duty than the police of “previous eras”. A polling official reports later that the difference between these men and the local police is like “day and night”. We return to Herat ahead of the ballot-boxes, which are delayed by late arrivals from hillside communities. It becomes apparent that household bleach can conceal the ink: flashbacks to the West Bank in January. Our own observations of turnout seem to match nationwide estimates of just over 50%, but the crucial questions remain unanswered for now: does this figure reflect frustration and disillusionment or simply the complexity of the process, and did the troubled regions of the south and east experience lower rates than elsewhere?

Back in range of news broadcasts there is the grim exercise of evaluating a different tally: during the election preparations seven candidates – out of almost 6,000 – have been killed, along with six election workers. Apart from a firefight in Kunduz, the north and west have been mostly free of incidents on election-day. Attacks in eastern Kunar and Nangarhar provinces have killed two voters and damaged a truck carrying ballots.

The rest of the fourteen deaths we hear about during the evening – in Khost, Helmand, Kandahar, and Nuristan – involve police, soldiers and insurgents, and inevitably some innocents near confrontations. I try to remember that it is not my place to value anyone’s life, but it is impossible to resist the assessment of our Afghan dinner companions: this is a far better toll than expected.

Tomorrow is the beginning of counting – at provincial centres to facilitate security and with mixing of ballots to conceal local results. We can check the numbered metal seals on the boxes we saw yesterday as they arrive, but little more will be known for a couple of weeks. In Pashtun Zarghun candidates from each of the ten or so main tribes have run for office – it is likely this failure to unite behind a few will result in none being elected. The tension will continue until late October at least. Only then, and perhaps not even then, will it be clear if the Afghan people will feel this day has given voice to their hopes for the future.