What if the Afghan elections actually work? --- (CNN) -- Afghans will go to the polls on Saturday to elect their second president since the overthrow of the Taliban in the winter of 2001. -- You might be wondering: Why bother? After all, doom and gloom are supposedly the order of the day in Afghanistan. A Pew/USA Today poll in January found that slightly more than half of Americans believe the United States has mostly failed to achieve its goals in Afghanistan. -- A month earlier, a CNN poll found that the Afghan War might well be the most unpopular war in American history. An overwhelming 82% of Americans are now opposed to the war. (At the start of 2014, the United States had 38,000 troops in Afghanistan.) -- Dire predictions of a civil war breaking out after the withdrawal of U.S. and other NATO combat troops from Afghanistan at the end of 2014 have been a staple in the American media for years, including in quite sensible publications such as the New Yorker. --- But a surprisingly under-reported set of developments has been taking place over the past several weeks in Afghanistan ahead of Saturday's presidential election. It shows that Afghans are not preparing for another civil war and instead a large majority of Afghans are planning to participate in the first democratic transition of power in Afghan history, while the presidential candidates are engaged in the kind of campaigning and deal-making that would gladden the heart of Bill Clinton. --- Even with the Taliban violence, recent polling by the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan found that 75% of Afghans said they wanted to vote. That is essentially the same finding of a separate poll taken almost a year ago that found that 76% of Afghans planned to vote. --- Even allowing for some drop-off on Election Day, most Afghan experts I have talked to believe the turnout will likely be in the 60% to 70% range. Turnout in the previous presidential election in 2009 was only around 30%. --- By contrast, the last time a U.S. presidential election had a 60% turnout was in 1968, and the last time it was above 70% was in 1900. - More, Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst, at: http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/02/opinion/bergen-afghan-elections/index.html