INSIDE KARZAI'S CAMPAIGN

By Tim McGirkKABUL Massimo Calabresi/Washington; Muhib Habibi/Kandahar; Nick Meo/Shebarghan

DURING AFGHAN PRESIDENT HAMID Karzai's first campaign outing two weeks ago, an enemy rocket whizzed by his U.S. military helicopter and slammed into the camelback hills where he was supposed to land. Karzai brushed off the near miss, but his American guardians insisted on returning to Kabul. Half-jokingly, Karzai said, "I'm an Afghan, and I promise I'll take my revenge." Sure enough, the next day, Karzai slipped past his American protectors and, with two baffled Afghan bodyguards in tow, commandeered a driver to take him to a Kabul bazaar. The President wanted to buy a pomegranate.

It took a few seconds for shopkeeper Gul Ahmad to realize that the elegant man asking for the ruby red fruit was none other than the leader of Afghanistan. Ahmad hugged Karzai and began shouting his name in disbelief. Soon a crowd gathered, pressing in on the President. By all accounts, he was at ease, joking with shoppers, enduring bear hugs. Meanwhile, his two Afghan bodyguards were frantically calling for backup. But Karzai bought his pomegranate and, by showing he wasn't intimidated, had exacted his revenge.

More important, it gave Afghans and Karzai a brief chance to get reacquainted. Karzai needs this kind of impromptu pressing of the flesh because on Oct. 9 he will face 17 rivals in the country's first-ever presidential election. Since political differences here are often resolved with bullets, Karzai, 46, has been an invisible candidate, rarely leaving his granite-walled palace. U.N. officials say a third of the country is still in the grip of either Taliban fighters or lawless warlords, making it nearly impossible for Karzai and other candidates to campaign freely. Parliamentary elections will be held next April.

This election is being closely watched in Washington. During his campaign, President George W. Bush has repeatedly touted Afghanistan as a success story, in part to counter the horrific news coming out of Iraq. The inevitable TV-news clip of an Afghan woman lifting her blue veil to mark a ballot will be offered as compelling proof that Afghanistan, as Bush says, is "on the path to democracy and freedom."

It is still a difficult journey. To help secure Afghanistan against a new Taliban offensive aimed at sabotaging the elections, the U.S. is flying in 1,100 more troops to join the 15,000 already in the country. The Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan for nearly six years before the U.S. toppled the regime after 9/11, has made a campaign promise. "We will hit the election offices and the candidates, and anyone who gets in our way will die," spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi told TIME by satellite telephone from an undisclosed location. At the same time, any victory that smells too much of U.S. influence could taint rather than legitimize Karzai and widen the murderous ethnic divisions among Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras. The vote could also conceivably strengthen the warlords, weakening Karzai's ability to govern. He's trying to secure victory through brokered deals, offering some of the warlords jobs in his next Cabinet. As John Sifton of Human Rights Watch, a U.S. monitoring group, says, "Votes aren't being campaigned for; they're being bought by strongmen." Afghans, in other words, still live under the rule of the gun and the bribe, not the ballot.

The strongmen don't come any stronger than General Abdul Rashid Dostum. A former communist general known to have ordered enemy captives crushed under a Russian tank, Dostum, 49, is trying to transform himself from warlord into smiling presidential candidate. That's going to take some finesse, given that he strikes fear in many Afghans in his northern stronghold of Shebarghan. Dostum's idea of campaigning is to sit on a thronelike chair in his rose garden and scowl at a line of deferential tribal elders, officials and militia commanders who will be expected to deliver votes from among the Uzbeks. Those who don't obey suffer--such as one Uzbek man whose wife was kidnapped when he refused to rejoin Dostum's forces.

To expect a U.S.-style election in such a traditional society is wishful thinking, says Afghanistan's National Security Adviser, Dr. Zalmai Rassoul. In the countryside, only 36% of men and 8% of women can read, so most will follow the advice of village clergymen, tribal elders and family patriarchs. "What we don't want," says Rassoul, "are commanders who try to influence people by threats."

Threats may be inevitable in a race in which at least five candidates are linked to private armies. Karzai's main rival, Yunus Qanooni, 43, is a former resistance leader who still commands loyalty from Tajik fighters in the north. In hundreds of the country's 5,000 polling stations, it will be Qanooni's men who stand guard, raising the prospect of intimidation. Many voters think that somehow the commanders will know whether they have betrayed them on the ballot. Says Sifton: "The vast majority of voters don't understand that their ballot will be kept secret." Karzai's supporters aren't above arm twisting either. In the eastern province of Khost, a group of 300 elders of the Terezay tribe threatened to torch the houses of anyone who doesn't cast his or her vote for the President.

Even without such threats, Karzai would win a first-round majority of 51% in a fair and free race, say international poll observers. Karzai is considered one of the few candidates who don't have blood on their hands from the bitter 1992-96 civil war. (Massouda Jalal, a plainspoken doctor and the sole woman in the field, is another.) Nor is Karzai pushing the interests of his fellow Pashtuns ahead of other ethnic groups. Pragmatic Afghans realize that foreign aid, which totaled $2.3 billion this year, might dry up if Karzai, who is well respected in the West, were to lose.

Karzai has some legitimate campaign challenges. A senior Afghan official says Iran, Russia and Pakistan are throwing money at different candidates. A Kabul black-market money changer claimed that the dollar's recent rise against the afghani, from 52 to 45, was due to the sudden influx of dollars. "In my village," says Fida Mohammed, who is from the Shomali Plain near Kabul, "our elders are seeing who offers us most before telling us how we should vote."

Alarmed by the possibility that Karzai might not win in the first round (experts say he would win a runoff against any single candidate), the President's supporters--including the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad--are scrambling to shore up votes. Senior Afghan officials, U.N. representatives and Western diplomats all claim that Khalilzad, an energetic Afghan American, is trying to induce several candidates--including the President's main rival, Qanooni--to drop out and throw their support behind Karzai. The ambassador denies that, even though one candidate, Mohammed Mohaqiq, went public with such an accusation. Khalilzad and Karzai dine together at least three times a week, palace insiders say, and many Afghans, by nature conspiratorially minded, are convinced that the election's outcome is rigged to favor Karzai.

To win decisively, Karzai needs support from his Pashtuns, many of whom are facing the threat of marauding Taliban and alQaeda fighters. It is a measure of the desperation of Karzai's supporters that a pro-Taliban tribal chieftain, Naim Kochi, was released two weeks ago from American custody in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he had been held for having truck with renegade anti-U.S. commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Kochi was sprung because he could deliver more than 55,000 votes from his Ahmedzai tribe, according to an influential tribesman involved in the negotiations. But after his two years in Gitmo, the gray-bearded elder may choose not to help Karzai. Revenge, after all, is an Afghan specialty.

On a crackling sat phone, Taliban spokesman Hakimi was heard ordering his men to turn off their motorcycle engines. He could have been speaking from a mountain road or a town in neighboring Pakistan, where many of the Taliban gather in the fundamentalist religious schools called madrasahs before crossing the border to try to kill U.S. soldiers. "Elections aren't part of Afghan culture. Anyway, it is fixed so the American puppet Karzai will win," he says. Afghan intelligence officials in the southern city of Kandahar say more than 2,000 Taliban fighters are roaming the desert outskirts of the city. Says Nick Downie, a representative of the Afghanistan Non-Governmental Organizations Security Office (ANSO), which provides security updates for aid workers: "The Taliban seem to be consolidating, moving their men into place for a big push at elections." In Kabul, coalition soldiers have found explosives hidden in trucks, taxis and even fruit carts. There are fears that more bombs may have gone undiscovered, primed for election targets.

National Security Adviser Rassoul says the Taliban and al-Qaeda may terrorize the election but they won't succeed in stopping it. More than 10 million voters are registered, he says, though some observers say those figures are inflated by multiple registrations. Says Rassoul: "The Taliban won't derail the process." In the meantime, Karzai is assured of one vote from his Kabul shopping trip: a bent old man who pleaded with him to help free his son, thrown in jail during the Taliban days and forgotten there. Karzai drove the old father back to the palace to personally arrange the son's release. So at least one Afghan is on the path to freedom. But for the rest of this country, the freedom to vote isn't likely to translate soon into freedom from the fear of warlords and terrorists. With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/Washington, Muhib Habibi/ Kandahar and Nick Meo/Shebarghan