Afghanistan is sticking to its goal of holding a presidential election in the summer and will not be deterred by recent violence or the daunting task of registering more than 10 million voters, Afghan Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai said on Monday.
"Our goal is very much to hold the election this summer. The process of registration is being accelerated," Ghani, in Tokyo for meetings with Japanese officials, told Reuters.
"Both men and particularly women are being urged and are actually responding to that appeal and are registering in large numbers," he said.
According to the United Nations, about 1.07 million Afghans had registered to vote across the country as of February 21 out of an eligible electorate of 10.5 million.
Only a quarter of those registered by then were women.
The logistical difficulties of reaching people in a country where the infrastructure is in tatters after decades of war and where militants are seeking to derail the vote has led to predictions that the poll will be delayed.
Ghani, who met Japanese Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi and Finance Minister Sadakazu Tanigaki, said later that a final decision on the election timing was up to the United Nations.
"Every effort will be made to meet June but the determination is not by the Afghan government, it is by the United Nations," he said. "We will try our best," he told Reuters, adding that "anything later than September would be very problematic."
More than 550 people have died in violence since early August, much of it blamed on militants from the Taleban and its allies who have declared a "jihad" or holy war on foreign troops, Afghan forces and aid organisations.
Five local aid workers were shot dead near Kabul late last month, a Turkish engineer was murdered in the southern province of Zabul earlier in March and another kidnapped, and an Afghan aid worker was killed over the weekend, also in Zabul.
Ghani said, however, that impressions that the entire country was being torn by such incidents were incorrect.
"The intensification of the campaign against terrorism should not prevent us from our main goal, which is securing increasing participation of the Afghan population in determining their future, and with international co-operation we are quite confident that we should be able to meet our goal," he said.
Ghani steered clear of setting any target for a March 31 donors conference in Berlin but said international donors' response had been "very good".
Ghani has said Kabul is seeking $25 billion in reconstruction aid over the next seven years and another $3.5 billion in budget support over the same period, but on Monday he stressed those figures were not targets for the Berlin meeting.
"The actual commitment will depend on the political, parliamentary and legal processes in significant donor countries and international organisations," he said.
Ghani struck an upbeat tone about Afghanistan's struggling economy, saying growth was not limited to Kabul but was even faster in some provincial cities and that farm-to-market links were improving.
"The country is being woven into one economic unit...a national economy is very much on the way to formation," he said.
He acknowledged, though, that the opium trade, grinding poverty that means some 70 percent of the population lack enough calories for daily consumption, and the difficulties in stabilising security remained huge obstacles.
"What is probably the single most important characteristic of the country is the sense of hope - hope that the next generation will have a much better life and opportunities than the previous ones did," he said.
"And that's the challenge. To respond to these hopes and keep them alive, one must deliver and delivery must take place on a credible, realistic and predictable basis," he added.
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