"Mr Hazrat explained how, last month, 500 tribal elders gathered to discuss the vote. They agreed that everyone in Afghanistan’s three south-eastern provinces would vote for Mr Karzai. Then they ate, prayed and went to Kabul to inform the president."

"Mr Hazrat’s method also indicates a weakness in Afghanistan’s traditional ways. In neighbouring Khost province, another Pushtun tribe has decreed that anyone who does not vote for Mr Karzai will have his house burnt down.

"How many people were actually entitled to vote, to the nearest few millions, has been something of a mystery. The UN estimated 10.5m eligible voters and, against expectation, registered almost that number, 41% of them women. But the original estimate was based on a 1979 census taken before a war in which 2m died and one-third of the population was displaced. Some registrations, too, are dubious. Many voters, perhaps 30% of the total, appear to have registered many times. Children are thought to have been registered, and, in the wild south-eastern provinces near the border with Pakistan, foreigners as well. Voter-registration in Paktia reached 170% of the target, but in southern Zabul province, where the Taliban roam, it was only 55%, with 7% women."

"The EU and other foreign organisations mustered fewer than 200 election observers. Indeed, to get round the EU’s standards, under which the vote would have been condemned from the outset, they were not called “election observers”, but “democracy-support teams”.

Arf