The Taliban leadership has redeployed some of its most hardline foot soldiers into areas of Afghanistan where local insurgents are reluctant to disrupt the country's elections on Thursday.
Details of the move emerged as a statement, said to carry the authority of the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, reiterated that the movement would attempt to stop Afghans from voting.
It came hours before a rocket struck the presidential palace in Kabul early this morning and a second hit the Afghan capital's police headquarters. The first rocket caused some damage inside the heavily fortified palace compound in the city centre, but there were no injuries.
The insurgent leadership appears to be trying to harden resolve among its men on the ground and foil deals struck between the government and individual commanders designed to guarantee peace on polling day.
This morning Nato also said its forces in Afghanistan were suspending "offensive operations" during the election.
An official within the Afghan interior ministry said Taliban fighters had been moving from "hardline provinces" such as volatile Paktika and Paktia in the east into "less hardline" areas such as Wardak and Ghazni, south of Kabul.
On Sunday the country's intelligence chief, Amrullah Saleh, announced that commanders across the south had been paid off not to interfere with the elections. The interior ministry official said the government was receiving "mixed reports" about how much violence could be anticipated on election day: "Some commanders are still saying they will fight, while in other areas the threat is coming from outsiders."
For months now Taliban fighters have been dropping messages in villages – so-called "night letters" – threatening to punish anyone who attempts to vote on Thursday. One threat is that anyone found with indelible ink on their finger – given to anyone who casts a vote to prevent double voting – will have their finger cut off.
Haroun Mir, former special adviser to the anti-Soviet resistance fighter Ahmed Shah Massoud, said the mere threat of retributions could "undermine the legitimacy of the whole election".
"Even with these ceasefires no one living in areas of Taliban influence will want to take the risk of going out to vote," he said. "We could end up with the half of the country that lives in the north picking the next president, which could lead to some very big fights in the future."
The country will deploy all available security forces to try to ensure the election is as smooth as possible, with tens of thousands of extra foreign forces used to secure the outer security perimeter of polling stations.
Elections officials say around 10% of the approximately 7,000 polling centres may not be able to open because of insecurity, although the final number will not be known until just before polls open.
Today was the last day in which open campaigning is permitted by law, and the second-placed candidate, Abdullah Abdullah, attended a major rally in Kabul's main sports stadium.
A helicopter flew over the heads of the 10,000-strong crowd dropping leaflets calling for change, and Abdullah delivered a scathing attack on the record of the president, Hamid Karzai, which has been marred by allegations that he has ignored corruption in his own government.
Abdullah asked the crowd: "Do you want to vote for the president who releases killers from jail, who releases opium traders from jail?"
Meanwhile, Karzai played the final card of his more traditional strategy of gathering the support of ethnic, religious and regional powerbrokers, no matter how unsavoury they may be. The president, who already outraged the UN when he selected former warlord Mohammad Qasim Fahim as his running mate in May, gave the all-clear for notorious Uzbek militia leader Abdul Rashid Dostum to return on Sunday night from exile in Turkey.
The whisky-drinking strongman from northern Afghanistan flew back into the country on Sunday night despite the strong opposition of the US and the UN, who believe he is a human rights abuser.
The US embassy in Kabul released a strong statement, saying it had "serious concerns about the prospective role of Dostum in today's Afghanistan, and particularly during these historic elections ... Among other concerns, his reputed past actions raise questions of his culpability for massive human rights violations."
Dostum had been living in Ankara ever since he fled Kabul in February last year to avoid charges of assaulting one of his political arrivals. His supporters had threatened to withdraw their electoral support from Karzai if he was not allowed to return.
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