Aug. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Presidential voting in southern Afghanistan was subject to little attention from international observers because of attacks by Taliban guerrillas, raising the possibility of fraud there, independent monitoring groups said.

Voter turnout was “particularly low in the south,” the European Union’s election monitoring mission said in a statement today, and election observers said it may have been as little as 10 percent in Kandahar province. A free vote in the south “was not the case,” said the mission’s chief, Philiipe Morillon, at a press conference in Kabul.

Low turnout in the south may have shifted the vote’s result against President Hamid Karzai, whose main support base is there, and undermined the credibility of the election, said Marvin Weinbaum, an election observer with Democracy International, Inc. The Obama administration and its allies are seeking a credible election result that would politically boost the next Afghan administration as it fights the Taliban.

The national election commission says it has a preliminary count of ballots made in polling places and will begin announcing the results on Aug. 25 as ballot boxes are received and checked in regional counting centers. Yesterday, commission director Daoud Ali Najafi called on Karzai and his main challenger, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, to stop making claims that they are leading in the count and to await the official results.

International monitoring groups said they saw little of the election in southern provinces, where the EU mission visited only six out of more than a thousand polling sites. Monitors have expressed concerns that that ethnic Pashtun men backing Karzai might stuff ballot boxes with tens of thousands of votes cast by proxy in the names of their female relatives, who are pressured by traditional culture from appearing in public.

Impartiality Questioned

“The local election commission staff in different areas did not fully observe impartiality” and were sometimes seen advising people which candidates to support, said Ahmed Nader Nadery, chairman of the largest monitoring group, the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan. The group’s report, outlined in a press conference, reinforced questions raised by Afghans and foreign election observers about the neutrality of the election commission, which was appointed by Karzai.

Nadery told reporters his group’s 6,000-plus monitors also saw people carrying boxes full of voter registration cards into polls, even though each voter is entitled only to one card as a step against the casting of multiple votes.

Fraud Allegations

The European Union’s 120-member monitoring mission noted a bias of Afghan media coverage in favor of Karzai and an inaccurate voter registration list. It said “voting operations were administered in a satisfactory manner,” but said fraud allegations must be investigated and stopped short of declaring the election credible.

Abdullah’s campaign has lodged dozens of complaints of fraud with an official body, the Election Complaints Commission, said campaign spokesman Fazl Sangcharaki. He said in an interview that Abdullah’s campaign agents were barred from some polling stations and that local officials in Karzai’s ethnic Pashtun stronghold in the south sometimes directed people to vote for him.

Other top rivals to Karzai, former Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani and ex-Planning Minister Ramazan Bashardost, also alleged a pattern of fraud.

The complaints commission consists of two Afghan members and three from other countries.

Meeting Aspirations

Any hope of eventually defeating Islamic militancy in Afghanistan will require an Afghan government that better meets its people’s aspirations, said Weinbaum, a specialist on the region at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

Over eight years, Karzai and his international backers have failed to keep Afghanistan’s war from spreading. A classified Afghan government security map produced in April showed that 40 percent of the country was under Taliban control or subject to a “high risk” of attack from the militants, according to U.S. terrorism specialist Peter Bergen at the Washington-based New America Foundation.

The government has been unable to fulfill Afghans’ aspirations for an economic recovery from three decades of war. Measured by income, life expectancy and literacy, Afghanistan is the world’s fifth-poorest country, according to a 2007 report by the Afghan government and the United Nations.

The Taliban carried out 270 separate attacks on election day across 15 of the country’s 34 provinces, according to counts by international and Afghan news organizations. Twenty to 30 people died in the attacks.

‘Step Forward’

The low turnout in the south, and heavier voting in the north raised speculation Karzai will fail to win 50 percent of the vote, which would put him in a runoff against his leading challenger, almost certainly Abdullah, said Abubakar Siddique, an Afghan political analyst.

In the U.S., President Barack Obama said yesterday that the election was an “important step forward in the Afghan people’s efforts to take control of their future.” He praised the courage of voters who went to the polls, standing up to threatened violence by Taliban insurgents.

“Even in the face of this brutality, millions of Afghans exercised their right to choose their leaders and determine their own destiny,” Obama told reporters at the White House. “I believe that the future belongs to those who want to build, not those who want to destroy.”

As the Obama administration shifts America’s national security focus -- and U.S. troops -- from Iraq to Afghanistan, it needs a stronger Afghan government to confront Taliban militants whose attacks are killing record numbers of foreign troops and Afghan civilians.

In the 65,000-strong U.S.-led coalition, 283 troops have been killed this year, a rate 50 percent above last year’s record high, according to the monitoring group iCasualties. More than 1,000 civilians were killed through June, 20 percent more than last year’s record high, United Nations figures show.

To contact the reporter on this story: James Rupert in Kabul at jrupert3@ bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: August 22, 2009 12:54 EDT