On election day, a pack of bone-thin, restless dogs wandered into the main polling center in Sheikhabad, a town in Afghanistan’s Wardak Province. A pair of Afghan policemen tried to chase them away, but the determined bunch kept returning, looking for a shady redoubt from the morning sun. Eventually the police relented, and the dogs settled down for a nap.

The canines were the only visitors there for hours—not a single person had come to vote. On the day of Afghanistan’s parliamentary elections, meant to determine the makeup of one of the country’s few remaining independent government institutions, most of Wardak’s polling centers were empty, filled only with policemen and corrupt government officials.

Wardak, a region of craggy hills and broad valleys, is typical of many rural Pashtun parts of the country, where large swathes of territory have fallen under Taliban control. The Taliban forbid the population to vote, and the Afghan government and the foreign forces lack the ability to displace the insurgents’ writ, effectively disenfranchising the majority of the Pashtun population.

From the moment I arrived in Wardak, it seemed clear that the authorities were desperate to avoid the very embarrassment of a low turnout that was unfolding before me. Early in the morning I visited the capital, Maydan Shahr, a sleepy town of a few thousand, made up of a couple of stall-lined streets and a sprawling governor’s compound. Inside the polling center, nearly a hundred young men stood in a densely-packed row, waiting for their chance to vote. Almost all were Hazaras, a minority ethnic group in Wardak, whose members, at least on this day, appeared to favor tight jeans and oiled hair.

I approached one who was wearing a Playboy t-shirt and asked him why he was voting. “I want to choose someone to represent me and my community,” he said. “It’s how we can help our country.”