What I’m reading right now.
The young woman from Kandahar sat with me in the office of an independent monitoring group two days before Afghanistan’s August 20th presidential election. Halima had defied her family and threats from neighbors in the tumultuous southern region to work as an election observer and to vote. “It’s in our destiny to take our rights,” she said. “We should not be scared of anything.”
There was, unfortunately, a lot to be scared of on election day in Afghanistan’s south, as the rest of this HRW article details.