KABUL: At a Minnesota campaign rally, US President George W. Bush hails democratic progress in Afghanistan and plans for presidential elections next month as "unbelievable".

Thousands of kilometres away in Afghanistan itself, security experts, independent analysts and candidates are equally amazed that the polls will go ahead on Oct. 9, in spite of insecurity and few guarantees that the vote will be free and fair.

If anything were needed to stress the threat by Taliban and allied militants to derail the vote, it came shortly before Bush spoke on Thursday, when US-backed President Hamid Karzai survived an assassination bid in the city of Gardez.

Karzai was on his first campaign trip outside the capital, when a rocket flew over his US military helicopter as it prepared to land and exploded nearby. Karzai's US minders did not think twice: the landing was aborted and the president whisked back to Kabul where he has spent much of the past two years since a previous assassination attempt confined him to his heavily fortified palace.

Karzai was left to bemoan his "over-precautious" security, but the incident made clear that the Taliban threat to kill him and any of his 17 challengers in what will be Afghanistan's first direct election was not a hollow one.

The most serious challenge yet to the polls came as Karzai's leading rivals called for a delay of at least a month, saying security worries meant they were unable to campaign properly.

More than 1,000 people have already died in militant-related violence across Afghanistan in the past year, including 12 election workers in the period from May to August alone.

Experts like Nick Downie, in charge of security for non-governmental organisations, warn of worse to come and say provisions Washington and its allies have made to protect the election have been inadequate, despite grand promises.

"We certainly anticipate a rise in attacks as we get closer to the elections and more assassination attempts against candidates, including Karzai," he said. Downie said recent weeks had been a period of "unnatural calm" on the part of insurgents who were thought to be preparing and consolidating their forces for a major push. "We are just waiting for the starting gun to really be fired by the insurgents and we think there is a lot worse to come."

AID WORKERS WITHDRAWN: Already, said Downie, hundreds of local and foreign aid workers had been pulled back from the provinces to Kabul, or had left the country. He dismissed US plans announced on Thursday to send an additional battalion of elite troops to patrol populated areas and the response of the 26 Nato countries in providing peacekeeping troops as "too little too late".

"It's going to make very little difference and in any case should have been done long ago. The insurgents know the terrain better than any US battalion and the initiative is theirs.

The United States has around 18,000 troops in Afghanistan chasing Taliban and Al Qaeda guerrillas - a fraction of its numbers in Iraq, which has a smaller land area. Nato has around 8,200 troops on the ground.

An independent think-tank, the Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit, issued a report on Thursday criticizing the inadequate international protection and monitoring of the poll process.

It said this risked giving the impression that "the international community is not actually interested in the quality of the process, only having an end result". It said security worries and lack of confidence in the process meant the presidential polls, in which more than 11.5 million people inside and outside the country may vote, were likely to be observed by fewer than 150 international monitors.

Analysts say that for Washington, the polls are about one thing: legitimising Karzai, who has ruled with strong American backing since the Taliban's overthrow in late 2001, and giving Bush a boost for his November re-election bid.

Karzai exuded confidence to reporters in spite of Thursday's close shave, saying: "I am very much confident that I will win." What concerns critics, though, is the damage the manner of such a victory could do to Afghanistan.

"This could prove tragically short sighted if it ends up detracting from the long-term credibility of electoral politics in Afghanistan," the AREU said. Indeed, the worry is just how many more casualties the insurgents may inflict, not just in the presidential poll, but in more complicated and risky parliamentary elections next April. -Reuters