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The Afghan government has agreed local 24-hour ceasefires with the Taliban for Thursday's presidential elections.
It is hoped the truces will let people vote and could even form the basis of permanent peace talks with the Taliban, the man in charge of reconciliation has told the Standard.
But ambushes and explosions are likely to continue until midnight on Wednesday.
Officially the Taliban have vowed to boycott the elections and have threatened to attack polling stations.
But the man charged with leading reconciliation efforts, Arif Noorzai, and president Hamid Karzai's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, claim they have split local commanders from the Taliban high command in Pakistan. Intelligence sources said most of the local commanders involved in the ceasefire have been bought off.
They refused to say whether the cash had come from a $220million pot, put up by the international community, to bankroll the elections.
Under the terms of the truce, local insurgents have agreed to "neither help, nor intervene" so long as Nato troops do not attack them on polling day, Mr Noorzai said.
If it works, it could spell the beginning of the end of a bloody counter-insurgency that began in 2001.
Afghanistan's defence minister Abdul Rahim Wardak announced yesterday that Afghan troops would observe a day-long ceasefire.
Mr Noorzai, a former minister of tribal affairs, said if the deals are honoured they could form a foundation for more permanent peace talks. "It's a test," he said.
"We've reached agreements with most of the opposition to let us open the polling stations. They will be impartial, neither helping nor intervening." But the Taliban remain a formidable opponent and have warned against voting. They are particularly strong in the largely Pashtun south and east areas where president Karzai hopes to gain the strongest support. In Khowst, in the east, militants issued letters threatening to kill people for taking part in the polls.
In Zabul, in the south, locals said the Taliban have vowed to chop off any fingers found marked with the indelible ink which is used to identify voters. But Ahmed Wali Karzai claimed Taliban commanders inside Afghanistan were divided.
"Some Taliban leaders will look the other way," he said.
Talk of a truce comes amid grave fears that low voter turnout could mean the elections have no legitimacy.
A low Pashtun vote would favour president Karzai's main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, whose support base is mainly in the Tajik north. Mr Karzai took part in his first ever televised debate last night. His third-placed rival, Ramazan Bashar Dost, was widely credited as winning the debate.
Millions of women may not get the chance to vote because the organisation behind polls still has to recruit more than 40,000 staff to work in female-only polling stations.
"If half of the population can't participate, the election is illegitimate," said Orzala Ashref, a director of the Afghan Women's Network.
