KABUL, Sept 8: Afghanistan’s first vice president on Saturday warned deteriorating security could jeopardise transparent elections in 2014 as Kabul prepares to take over from Nato troops.

“We have two big challenges in the next one and a half years — first the withdrawal of foreign troops and the second test is the 2014 presidential elections,” Mohammad Qasim Fahim told a ceremony marking 11 years since the killing of anti-Taliban commander, Ahmad Shah Masoud.

President Hamid Karzai, who has been the only elected head of state in Afghanistan since the 2001 US-led invasion brought down the Taliban, is due to stand down in 2014.

His re-election in 2009 was accompanied by widespread fraud and the international community sees the next vote as one of the last major hurdles before Nato combat troops withdraw at the end of 2014.

Fahim, one of Afghanistan’s most powerful warlords and a former defence minister, reiterated a common Afghan request for more weapons for the Afghan security forces who are being trained by Nato to take over.

“If the Afghan nation backs the security forces and the coalition forces equip and arm Afghan forces necessarily it will be good.

If they don’t, definitely there will be security problems in Afghanistan after 2014,” he said.

Fahim fought in the 1980s resistance to Soviet troops under Masoud and then became a military commander in the Northern Alliance that joined with US-led troops to oust the Taliban regime in 2001.

“If the security turns bad, I don't believe we will have transparent and nationwide elections so that all Afghan people could take part and cast their votes,” he said.

“The neighbours of Afghanistan... will then influence the country and bring back the past misery,” he said.

Fahim is a Tajik, the second largest ethnic group in Afghanistan behind Karzai's Pukhtun community, from which the bulk of the Taliban are also drawn.—AFP