A record number of women are running in Afghanistan's critical parliamentary elections next month despite many being inundated with threatening phone calls, including death threats from insurgents.
Amid ever-rising violence, which some people fear could foster a repeat of last year's catastrophic presidential election, women are struggling to campaign at all outside a few areas, poll monitors say.
Even in Kabul, the capital, where the Guardian has interviewed a number of female candidates, women say they are facing daily obstruction from conservative hardliners, including death threats.
With voting billed for 18 September, Kabul's streets have been plastered in posters and billboards, many of which show the faces of would-be female MPs in the capital, the number of whom has more than doubled since 2005. However, many of the posters do not stay up long, or get defaced with slashes of bright red ink.
Afghanistan is a society in chaos. And is it any wonder with this level of patriarchal dominance. The trouble is that President Karzai is unlikely to do very much, if anything, to change a culture which thrives on violence, corruption, chauvinism and the suppression of the human rights of one half of the population.
Unfortunately, the track record of the occupying coalition is not much better. My view is that nothing will ever change for the better in Afghanistan until women are accorded equal treatment.
