by Rachel Morarjee
KABUL - Afghanistan's first post-Taliban parliamentary polls are to be delayed until September, President Hamid Karzai and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Thursday as the American official praised the country's moves towards democracy.
Karzai said "technical matters" had forced the country's electoral commission to postpone the vote, already put off repeatedly during the past nine months due to problems with politics, logistics and security.
However Rice, on her first visit to Kabul, hailed the elections as another example of Afghanistan's recovery after two and a half decades of war and of US success in promoting freedom in the Islamic world.
"They proposed September and we respect whatever recommendation this commission makes," Karzai told a joint news conference. "The delay in the elections is because it was impossible to have it in May as we wanted it."
The vote was originally scheduled for June 2004 alongside Afghanistan's first presidential election, but both ballots were delayed.
The presidential poll was put back until October 2004, with Karzai winning by a landslide, and the parliamentary election pencilled in for the Afghan month of Saur, which ends on May 21.
But the United Nations earlier this month said that was no longer possible as the government had missed a deadline to announce the date 90 days in advance.
"I've been told by this commission that they have agreed on a date, it's September," Rice told the press conference.
"I'm quite confident that this election will be yet another example of the Afghan people's commitment to democracy," she added.
Rice praised the Afghan people as an inspiration to the world for emerging from decades of turmoil and rejecting terrorism, despite a bomb blast in the birthplace of the ousted Taliban regime Thursday that killed five people.
She told US troops at a military base near Kabul that the "desire for freedom" was spreading.
"It spread to Iraq. It spread to Lebanon. It's spreading throughout the Middle East."
Rice said the United States was going to "build a different kind of Middle East... where our children will one day not have to worry about the kind of ideologies of hatred that led those people to fly those airplanes into those buildings on September 11."
It was Al-Qaeda's 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington that prompted US-led forces to invade Afghanistan in search of the group's leader Osama bin Laden and his allies the Taliban.
In the three years since the regime was toppled, the country has begun to get back on its feet, with some eight million people voting for the first time in the presidential elections.
The Taliban failed to disrupt that vote despite numerous threats, although US-led forces and international peacekeepers will be on guard for the parliamentary elections.
"The Afghan people are waiting very eagerly to send their members to the parliament," Karzai added.
03/17/2005 17:04 GMT