This week, U.N. election monitoring teams were confined to their urban compound after U.N. officials received letters threatening to kill or kidnap U.N. workers in Khost. Leaflets found in mosques, meanwhile, warned residents not to go near foreign troops or facilities, threatening hundreds of Afghans who work with the United Nations and other agencies.
"The process has been very disheartening," said one frustrated worker. "We need to be talking with people, but we cannot get out to the new sites for proper supervision. You can't force people to register, and you do not get good results when you conduct an election in an atmosphere of insecurity."
Even within families, the tensions between old and new ways of thinking can lead to confrontation. Sharif Zadran, who teaches history at Khost University and is married to Sahira, said he was proud of his wife's efforts to promote voting among women but had come under considerable pressure from his relatives to stop her high-profile activism.
"Tradition is a very hard thing to fight, and I have stepped on tradition by allowing my wife to work in public," said Zadran, a Khost native who returned here to teach last year after spending years in Pakistan and the Afghan capital, Kabul. "Now we have people breaking into our house at night, and even my cousins are speaking against me."
As the voter registration program reaches farther into the hills and hollows of Khost, the tugs of tradition and change are being played out in complex and sometimes creative ways. Community leaders realize that more voters will mean more economic and political benefits, but they must also ensure that women do not bring shame on their communities when they take part.
In the mountain district of Musakhel, dozens of robed and turbaned village men flocked Monday morning to have pictures taken and plastic ID cards made the day after a new voter registration site was set up at a tiny gas station.
Across the road and up a dirt path, the women of the village gathered in a farmhouse, affixing thumbprints to their voter cards. The photo squares were left blank. An 18-year-old woman, one of the few literate females in the area, copied down their names and approximate ages. Then a male election official carried the cards 50 yards to the gas station to be registered.
"We all want the chance to choose our leaders. The tribe is with us, and the tribe will defend us if we are attacked," said Sayed Kamal, a village elder and election team leader. "We want our women to vote, too, so we made this special arrangement. If they cross that main road and some strange driver sees them, people would talk."
In districts nearer the Pakistan border, officials trying to organize elections face more menacing obstacles. Small groups of fighters sneak across the hills from Pakistan, launch ambushes or rocket attacks and slip away in the night. Usually no one is killed, but a sense of insecurity persists.
At a police station in the Ghor Buz district Tuesday, officials pointed to a window shattered by a rocket fired from a nearby ditch two nights before. But a crowd of community elders gathered outside seemed undaunted by such attacks as they discussed plans to promote and protect voter registration.
"These people come from Pakistan like thieves in the night. They want to keep Afghanistan from getting ahead," said Hakim Mahmad, 55. "But we have been waiting years for elections. We will not let anyone pressure us -- not Taliban, not al Qaeda, not warlords, nobody. We want our children to use pens instead of weapons, and only elections can bring that." |
