KABUL—When Afghans cast ballots Saturday in parliamentary elections viewed as a crucial test run for the presidential vote, it will be a shrinking number of voters that braves the tide of Taliban and Islamic State violence.
For the first time since a U.S.-led invasion forced the Taliban from power in 2001, elections won’t be held across Afghanistan. Residents of an entire province won’t go to the polls because the country’s security forces can’t protect polling stations there.
Ghazni, the seventh most populous of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces at 1.3 million people, won’t be the only disenfranchised area. After planning to operate 7,384 polling places nationwide, authorities said this week only 5,074 would be open, a drop of almost one-third.
Elections have been seen by the U.S. and other Western allies as a key tool for building stability and paving the way for a reduced foreign presence in Afghanistan. The failure to secure voting in Ghazni and elsewhere is an alarming sign in a country already deeply divided by ethnicity, geography and privilege. In the case of Ghazni, “it’s the only choice authorities could have made, but it’s still an admission of failure,” one Afghan election expert said.
In the latest violent attack, one of the country’s most powerful political and military figures was killed Thursday at a meeting to discuss election security. The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan escaped unharmed. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack.
Afghanistan has held five elections since 2001, at a cost of at least $750 million, all of them tarnished by allegations of fraud and other irregularities.
But the prospect of a parliament—and after the election in April, a president—that represents a diminishing fraction of the country’s voters, is particularly alarming for a country besieged by a rural-based insurgency, said Scott Worden, director of the Afghanistan and Central Asia Programs at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, which promotes conflict resolution and prevention.
“The point of elections, if they work well, is to get representation so people can resolve their differences in a regulated, nonviolent political arena,” Mr. Worden said. “Afghanistan is beset by the Taliban because the communities that it springs from aren’t included. Now we’re narrowing down and narrowing down and excluding people, who instead will be tempted to vote with their feet by joining the insurgents.”
Most of the blame for depriving Afghans of the vote in Saturday’s election falls on the Taliban.
Afghanistan’s largest insurgency has called on voters and candidates to boycott, warned teachers against allowing their schools to be used as balloting sites and says it will target some 55,000 Afghan security forces deployed to polling places. The elections are a tool of “American invading forces” and a “malicious American conspiracy” aimed at distracting Afghans from the evils of foreign occupation, a statement issued by the insurgency last week said.
Since July, more than a hundred people, including at least nine candidates, have been killed and at least 200 others wounded in election-related violence, most of it carried out by the Taliban, authorities say.
Taliban representatives have met U.S. officials at least twice in the past 3½ months in an attempt to kick-start negotiations to end the 17-year war. But shifting diplomatic climate or not, “this is a war situation, not an election situation,” Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said.
In a telephone interview from Kabul, Mr. Mujahid defended the insurgency’s decision to attack security forces, though it puts at risk the lives of Afghans seeking to vote. “We’ll try not to hurt civilians, but we’ve warned them that they’re obliged not to participate in the election. If they do so and something happens, it’s their fault.”
Another important factor is the accumulated, often disillusioning, experience of five Afghan elections and the preparations for a sixth.
Saturday’s poll, in which 2,564 candidates, including 417 women, will vie for 249 seats in the Wolesi Jirga, Afghanistan’s lower house of parliament, has been postponed three times. The chamber, viewed widely as one of the most corrupt institutions in the country, has been sitting illegally for 3½ years.
The giddiness that accompanied the first presidential elections in 2004 has been dampened by the turmoil and accusations of cheating, as well as by the inability or unwillingness of Afghan authorities and Western donors to fix the system.
“I think there’s some disillusionment about this kind of democracy,” said Thomas Ruttig, co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, referring to the political system put in place after 2001. “The interest of potential voters is shrinking. The enthusiasm is gone.”
One measure of that is low voter registration. While up to 15 million Afghans are eligible to vote, only 8.8 million are registered, said Abdul Aziz Ibrahimi, spokesman for the Independent Election Commission, which oversees Afghanistan’s elections.
Even that figure is high, some Afghanistan experts said. “I think it’s closer to six or seven million,” one said. Under current election law, people who didn’t register for parliamentary elections won’t be able to vote for president.
Mohammad Karim, a 40-year-old resident of Kabul, didn’t bother and will now be shut out of the presidential vote. He said it would be crazy to vote on Saturday. “Why should I risk getting killed just to send a corrupt candidate to a corrupt parliament?”
The pressure to move ahead with the balloting has been enormous. In addition to serving as an opportunity to fine-tune the process, Western diplomats and Afghan officials say President Ashraf Ghani’s government has been eager to hold the polls before a gathering of foreign donors in Geneva next month.
The government’s progress and its use of $15.2 billion in development aid pledged in Brussels two years ago will be scrutinized. A successful election is seen as an important benchmark, the diplomats and officials say.
How “success” will be framed is another matter. No one expects the election to be free of fraud or violence. For many Afghans, the question is how low the bar goes before the international community condemns it.
United Nations officials and diplomats from donor nations are often evasive on the judging criteria. The terms “free and fair” and “credible,” applied to previous Afghan elections and balloting in other countries, are never mentioned.
More often than not, they say the elections are “Afghan-led and Afghan-organized” and, with this election, “Afghan-secured.” The formulation angers many Afghans and former officials, both because it reprises a mantra used in previous elections and because they see it as lowering voting standards for the sake of political expediency.
Mr. Worden, of the U.S. Institute of Peace, said elections could be the foundation of political stability for Afghanistan, but only if they work well.
“You need stability to have the strength to negotiate with the Taliban and ultimately, to allow [U.S.] troops to come home,” he said. “If there are too many flaws in the vote, then elections end up not being a source of stability and legitimacy and instead become a source of criticism for different Afghan political factions. That’s what hangs in the balance.”
Corrections & Amplifications After planning to operate 7,384 polling places nationwide, Afghan authorities said this week only 5,074 polling places would be open, a drop of almost one-third. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the drop was more than one-third. (Oct. 18)
Write to Craig Nelson at craig.nelson@wsj.com
