KABUL, Sept 5 Afghanistan's Taliban said on Sunday they would attempt to disrupt elections this month and warned Afghans to boycott the vote, in the first explicit threat against the poll by the militia.

The threat came just a day after Afghan President Hamid Karzai said he would soon announce members of a peace council to pursue talks with the Taliban, another step in his plan for reconciliation with the militants.

The Sept 18 parliamentary election is seen as a litmus test of stability in Afghanistan before US President Barack Obama conducts a war strategy review in December that will examine the pace and scale of US troop withdrawals from July 2011.

Despite the presence of almost 150,000 foreign troops, violence is at its worst across Afghanistan since the Taliban were ousted by US-backed Afghan forces in late 2001.

“This (poll) is a foreign process for the sake of further occupation of Afghanistan and we are asking the Afghan nation to boycott it,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said.

“We are against it and will try with the best of our ability to block it. Our first targets will be the foreign forces and next the Afghan ones,” he said by telephone from an undisclosed location.

Security is a major concern ahead of the vote, with four candidates killed in recent weeks and dozens of campaign workers wounded, according to the United Nations and government officials. Some of the attacks have been blamed on the Taliban.

Another candidate was wounded, and 10 of his campaign workers killed, in an air strike in the north on Friday, Mr Karzai has said.

The Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) says the strike killed a senior member of the Al Qaeda-linked Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.

The Taliban launched about 130 attacks against last year's presidential poll but failed to disrupt it significantly.

Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister who came second behind Mr Karzai last year, said he was worried about security.

“Not only has it not improved in the last few months, it has deteriorated,” Abdullah told a news conference in Kabul.

Polling centres

According to Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission (IEC), 938 out of a planned 6,835 polling centres will not open on election day because of security fears.

“While it is a difficult decision not to open the polling centres in certain locations, we agree with the decision of the IEC to protect the security of voters, electoral workers and the secure and effective scrutiny of polling centres and voting procedures,” the United Nations said in a statement on Sunday.

Apart from security, graft and cronyism are major concerns ahead of the vote after last year's fraud-marred presidential election, in which a third of votes for Mr Karzai were thrown out as fake.

The UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) said it was concerned some public officials were using their positions to help certain unidentified candidates and urged the government to protect the poll's impartiality and integrity.

Mr Abdullah withdrew from a second round of voting in last year's presidential ballot after the ECC found evidence of widespread fraud and ballot stuffing.

This year, Mr Abdullah said, it had become “like a trend” for election officials to approach candidates and ask for money in return for votes. “The (ECC) should take serious actions in this regard,” Mr Abdullah said.

“I will urge the people of Afghanistan to report on this. It is your destiny that will be decided.”

The ECC has been weakened this year, with only two of its three commissioners UN-appointed foreigners instead of the three foreigners it had last year.—Reuters