Presidential campaign is underway in Afghanistan

Out of 9.5 million Afghans having the right to vote at the October 9 presidential election, over seven million have been put on the ballot lists, The Frontier Post newspaper reports on Saturday with reference to David Singh, press secretary of the United Nations Kabul mission.

According to him, 4.3 million of the Afghan voters are male and 2.9 million - female.

So far there was no information on the registration data in some far-out regions. Nobody knows the precise figure because since 1979, when the Civil War broke out in Afghanistan, no population census has been held.

Another report says that the government of Pakistan has of late "agreed in principle" with the holding of election of a president for Afghanistan in the territory of Pakistan for over one million Afghans residing in refugee camps (in another information, up to six million Afghan refugees have found refuge among compatriots in Pakistan's North-Western border province, also called the zone of "independent Pashto tribes").

The government of Pakistan has provided this information for the Afghan government and the UN Kabul mission.

The conference held in Bonn in December 2001 decided to hold parliamentary and presidential elections in Afghanistan in June 2004. This decision was confirmed by the Berlin conference last April. However, the transitional government of Afghanistan, led by President Khamid Karzai, put off the elections to September at the last moment. Now, for reasons of security the elections are not just being delayed for an umpteenth time but also staggered - presidential in October and parliamentary, supposedly, not before April next year.