AFP

BY MID-MORNING on August 20th, election day, the police standing outside the Haji Janat Gul High School, a polling centre a few miles east of Kabul, estimated it had been visited by just four lorries, carrying a score of voters each, and three or four cars. After long conflicts, the second set of elections is often a story of unrealistic expectation turned to disillusion and apathy.

Across Kabul, turnout was sluggish. But at Haji Janat Gul the lack of voters had not dented the tally of votes. Only an hour after voting began, 6,000 had been cast. Yet not a voter was in sight. Staff insisted that the 6,000 had all come at 7am, when polls opened: “The Taliban said that they would cut off the fingers of people voting so they came early.”

This was impossible. Typically it takes four minutes to vote. For 6,000 to have voted in an hour at the 12 ballot boxes, they would have had an average of seven seconds each. The Electoral Complaints Commission later received allegations that the ballot boxes had been stuffed for President Hamid Karzai before polls opened, at the instigation of a local MP and tribal leader.

Three interlocking factors shaped the Afghan election day: large disparities in turnout across the country; the threat of Taliban violence; and allegations, as yet largely unproved, of systematic electoral fraud on behalf of Mr Karzai. Western military commanders claimed that the Taliban had failed to disrupt the election, with only 26 people killed on polling day. But the Taliban's strategy was one of intimidation, designed to deter rather than kill voters. In that they were successful.

During the poll there were some 400 insurgent incidents, making it the most violent day this year. Many seemed intended just to register the presence of insurgents in the area. In Wardak, for instance, a rocket landed in the general area of every polling centre. Threats to cut off fingers marked with the indelible ink used to prevent double voting turned out to be almost entirely baseless. But they worked as a deterrent.

In a relatively benign northern arc, from Herat in the west to Nangarhar in the east, turnout was as high as 60% in some areas, though in Nangarhar it fell to about 35%, and overall turnout was well below the level achieved in the previous presidential poll in 2004. In parts of the south, however, intimidation and apathy kept turnout extremely low. “The Taliban are patrolling the area. Nobody voted and nobody could vote,” said Haji Ahmad Shah Khan, an elder in Nad Ali district of Helmand. On election day the chief of the Independent Election Commission (IEC) in Helmand, Abdul Hadee, estimated turnout in the province at under 10%. In some districts no votes were cast at all.

Results have not yet been collated, and the outcome remains unpredictable. Both Mr Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah (pictured above), his main rival among the 41 candidates, have already claimed victory. In his campaign Mr Karzai mortgaged his future government several times over for the support of a rogue's gallery of former warlords. The first published results, of 10% of the polling stations, showed the rivals almost neck and neck. But there was little to be drawn from this since results will vary massively across different provinces, following varied turnout and divisions by ethnicity and tribe. Many of the southern provinces that are Mr Karzai's ethnic-Pushtun heartlands have yet to be counted.

The suppressed vote across the south would seem likely to harm Mr Karzai, but his opponents accuse him of using the state apparatus to engage in a large-scale fraud, with the absence of observers in unstable areas allowing him to stuff ballot boxes freely. Indeed some unstable areas have returned more votes than early estimates of turnout would suggest. In Helmand, for instance, Western officials believe that in the district of Garmser about 5,000 people voted. But the ballot boxes arriving in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, contain about 20,000. In Musa Qala the discrepancy was between 9,000 and 18,000. Mr Hadee, the IEC official, now says that turnout in Helmand was 25%. Some Western officials reckon 20% of votes nationally may be fraudulent.

Electoral complaints passed the 1,000 mark in mid-week. However, proving them will be hard. Afghans often vote in blocks according to the dictates of local leaders, so irregularities are almost impossible to spot. Millions of extra voting cards are known to have been illegally registered. There has been no recent census to establish lists of voters.

So the country is entering dangerous waters. Dr Abdullah has promised to place his faith in the IEC and the Complaints Commission, and not to send his supporters onto the streets. This will earn him the gratitude of foreign powers. But the ethnic dimension to the election, with Dr Abdullah seen as a Tajik (he is actually of mixed ethnicity) and Mr Karzai as a Pushtun, has forced an underlying tension within Afghan society close to the surface. “The biggest danger is that Afghans will view their government as even more illegitimate than they already do,” says John Dempsey, in Kabul for United States Institute of Peace, a Congressional think-tank. And as he notes, that would have consequences for the counterinsurgency.