President Hamid Karzai called on Afghans to defy Taliban threats and vote, hours before polls opened in an election on Thursday that could prove the toughest test yet of his own mandate and his nation's fragile democracy, Reuters reported.
Nearly as much as it is a test for Karzai, the election is also a high political hurdle for U.S. President Barack Obama, who has ordered a massive troop build-up this year as part of a strategy to reverse Taliban gains.
Afghan streets were tense with police on round-the-clock shifts. Karzai insisted the Taliban, stronger than at any time since they were toppled in 2001, would fail in their pledge to disrupt the country's second-ever presidential vote.
"Enemies will do their best, but it won't help," he told reporters late on Wednesday.
"I hope that tomorrow our countrymen, millions of them, will come and vote for the country's stability, for the country's peace, for the country's progress."
Karzai himself faces an unexpectedly strong challenge from his former foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah.
Polls, the most recent conducted more than a month ago, show Karzai winning by a wide margin, but not by enough to secure victory in a single round.
Should he fail to win more than 50 percent, Karzai would most likely face Abdullah in a run-off in October.
Perhaps greater than the threat at the ballot box is the threat on the battlefield from Taliban insurgents, who have vowed to disrupt the voting and ordered Afghans to stay home.
In a series of statements on Wednesday the Taliban said they had infiltrated 20 suicide bombers into Kabul and would close all the country's roads, taking no responsibility for the deaths of anyone who defied them to go to the polls.
U.S. officials say there may be some violence, but they do not think it will reach the scale needed to wreck the vote.
"The situation is serious and we need to turn the momentum of the enemy, but we can do that," said the new commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal.
"What we need to do is we need to correct some of the ways we operated in the past and we need to show the kind of resolve that's it going to take, and imagination in some cases, to operate smarter to do this right," he told the BBC.
INCREASED ATTACKS
The extent of any violence is nearly impossible to predict. The tempo of attacks has clearly increased in the weeks leading to the poll, with fighters mounting two big suicide car-bomb strikes and a building siege inside the normally secure capital.