It’s difficult to deny that Saturday’s election in Afghanistan was good news in the war on terror. A country that has known nothing but brutal oppression was able to vote in its first election.

The international media waited on the sidelines to see if the remnants of the Taliban would turn Afghanistan’s first election into a bloodbath.

But all they saw were thousands of Afghans (more than 40 percent of them women) lined up to cast their ballots for the first time.

The country also didn’t follow the typical Afghan political tradition of watching support disintegrate into ethnic blocs. Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun who won the election, had the support of many Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras.

The most remarkable part of the election was the Afghan people’s thirst for democracy. Despite threats to the voting registration centers from the Taliban and assassination attempts on the presidential candidates, more than 10 million Afghans registered prior to the election, as did 2 million more in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran.

The election wasn’t without it’s messier elements. Many people apparently registered to vote more than once.

Questions were also raised about the extent to which warlords and strongmen twisted local elections.

However, lots of countries have elections, and none of them are perfect.

We know from experience – the 2000 American election wasn’t a testament to the well-oiled machine of democracy.

And all the problems with Afghanistan’s election merely undercut the mesmerizing fact that a country that suffered deplorable human rights abuses three years ago now elects its own leaders.

Nevertheless, democracy hasn’t fully formed yet in Afghanistan; it’s only taken on the embryonic shape of a democracy. The people of Afghanistan have a terribly hard road ahead of them.

They live in a country that has been violently oppressed by different regimes for decades. The drug trade is booming, and warlords still hold sway in much of the country.

Afghanistan’s neighbors also aren’t exactly the harbingers of democracy.

To the south they have Iran, a theocracy that is developing nuclear weapons, and to the north they have Tajikistan, a brutal autocracy with strong leanings toward fundamentalist Islam.

But Saturday’s election was a sign that democracy can spring from soil bloodied by years of brutal oppression. We can only hope that the Iraqi elections in January take a cue from the Afghanistan electoral example.