Afghanistan: Kabul Diary: In Afghanistan, Would-Be Voters Braved an Endurance Test --- KABUL – Afghans have a saying that patience is bitter, but it bears a sweet fruit. --- This week, just days before the country holds national elections to find a successor to President Hamid Karzai, thousands of would-be voters put that wisdom to the test at registration offices across the country. -- While registration opened months ago for Afghans to get a card without which they can not cast a ballot this Saturday, election officials seemed to have underestimated the very human trait to leave things until the last minute. -- As a result, many people queued for hours outside registration offices struggling to meet demand ahead of the first election the country has held to bring about a democratic transfer of power, and only the third since the U.S.-backed ousting of the Taliban government in 2001. --- Even the threat of Taliban insurgent attacks on elections offices and workers didn’t keep them away. -- “There are some concerns about insecurity and there are some dangers, but we should vote,” Ezzatullah Nasiri, a truck driver, said early this week, after driving from the volatile southern province of Ghazni to register in the capital. He had come here not because he thought it was safer, but because he thought he stood a better chance of getting to the end of the line to get a card. -- Senior United Nations officials helping to stage the elections admitted that the last-minute rush to register was testing the ability of local officials to issue cards, in a country where bureaucratic inefficiency is just about as immovable as the Taliban. -- But they also said the surge was “heartening” because it pointed to an enthusiasm among Afghans to vote, with organizers hoping for a big increase on the 4.6 million people who cast valid ballots in the previous presidential election in 2009. More than 6,000 polling centers are expected to open around the country. -- Standing in the line near Mr. Nasiri, outside a registration center set inside a brightly-painted but rudimentary girls’ school in southern Kabul, 46-year-old labourer Ghazanfar seemed perhaps the most patient man in Afghanistan. He had been lining up every day for a week to get his card, and still didn’t have it in his hand.