AFGHANISTAN: Thousands of US troops in Afghanistan may have failed to catch Osama bin Laden but they are credited with encouraging millions of Afghans to register for the country's historic election in October.
Almost 10 million Afghans had put down their names and thumbprints when registration drew to a close yesterday.
There are some 18,000 US troops in Operation Enduring Freedom, hunting bin Laden and his ally Mullah Mohammad Omar, whose Taliban militia was driven from power in late 2001 by a US-led offensive.
A further 8,000 NATO-led peacekeepers are also deployed in Kabul and in the less troublesome north.
"These people are responding to the opportunity that has been provided to them by Enduring Freedom and the presence of the international community," said Mr Zalmay Khalilzad, Washington's envoy to Kabul, who had expected only six million out of more than 25 million Afghans to register.
"We are really in the frontline of freedom here," he said, while a few miles away at the international airport the first Canadian-designed ballot boxes were unloaded.
But for Afghans, who have lived through 23 years of war and foreign occupation, the abiding presence of warlords, some of whom are presidential candidates, a booming narcotics trade and rising violence, makes the US gift of democracy bitter-sweet.
UN officials said 9.9 million people had registered to vote in the October 9th presidential election and parliamentary polls six months later, and registration was being held open for a few remote areas.
Afghan and UN officials travelled around the country to garner voters.
Close to a thousand people have been killed in the past year as Taliban fighters stepped up a guerrilla campaign to disrupt Afghanistan's first ever democratic election.
US forces have lost almost 100 personnel in Afghanistan, with 2004 the worst year so far.
One of President Hamid Karzai's 17 rivals said if he won he would ask US forces to leave, adding that their departure would also see the remnants of the Taliban fade away.
"I personally see it as an occupying power," Mr Abdul Hadi Dabir, an independent candidate and veteran of the 1980s war against Soviet occupation, said.
"The effort is to bring Karzai back to power, not free and fair elections," Dabir said at his campaign headquarters.
The Afghan vote could give the Bush administration a foreign policy success story to offset the quagmire in Iraq before Americans vote for their own president on November 4th.