Mariam Wardak is one of those young Afghans with her feet in two worlds. At 28, she has spent much of her adult life in Afghanistan, but she grew up in the United States after her family fled there. She vividly remembers the culture shock of visits back to her family's village in rural Wardak province a decade ago.

“A woman wouldn’t even show her face to her brother-in- law living in the same house for 25 years,” she said. “People would joke that if someone kidnapped our ladies, we would have to find them from their voices. Now women in Wardak show their faces – they see everybody else’s faces.”

Wardak's mother, Zakia, is a prime example. She used to wear a burka in public, but now has had her face printed on thousands of ballot pamphlets for the provincial council in Wardak. She campaigns in person in a district, Saydabad, that is thick with Taliban.

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Running for vice-president
She has plenty of company in this year's elections, scheduled for Saturday. Another 300 women are running for provincial council seats around the country, more than ever before. And for the first time, a woman – Habiba Sarobi, the former governor of Bamian province – is running for vice-president on a leading national ticket.

There is finally the sense here, after years of international aid and effort geared toward improving Afghan’s women’s lives, that women have become a significant part of Afghan political life, if not a powerful one. But their celebratory moment is also coloured by the worry that those gains could so easily be reversed if extremists come back into power, or if western aid dwindles. Those concerns have added urgency to this campaign season for women who are fighting to make their leadership more acceptable in a still deeply repressive society.

“It’s an exciting and terrifying point, because the international presence has actually empowered the women here, and when they leave, some of those women will be concerned,” said Mariam Wardak, who is working on Sarobi’s campaign as well as her mother’s.

One notable change is simply that there have been more women speaking from the dais during rallies, including the wives of two of the more prominent national candidates.

That is a novelty that has drawn crowds in a country where most male public figures keep their wives in traditional seclusion – including President Hamid Karzai, despite his promises to women's groups years ago that she would be a visible part of Afghan life.

Intrigued
Afghans have been particularly intrigued by Sarobi's emergence as a running mate for the presidential candidate Zalmai Rassoul. She is not just a token name on a presidential ticket, but a campaign draw in her own right, as her stirring speeches have added a much-needed shot of crowd appeal to Rassoul's low- energy campaign.

Last Thursday, thousands of men and a few hundred women in the northern city of Mazar- e-Sharif cheered wildly for Sarobi, after only polite applause for the presidential candidate.

“She pretty much rocked the show,” said Haseeb Hamayoon, a Rassoul campaign aide.

“People want some change,” Sarobi explained, “and a woman on the ticket is a change for them.”

Fawzia Koofi, a politician and rights advocate, at one point said she would be running as a presidential candidate in this election, but she missed by a year the minimum age of 40 when candidates were registered. She recalled the days when politically active Afghan women were relegated to chanting slogans from behind privacy screens.

“A woman for vice-president? Eleven years ago, even dreaming about this was impossible,” Koofi said.

On the campaign trail, all of the eight presidential candidates still in the race have at least paid some lip service to supporting causes important to women – even Abdul Rab Rassoul Sayyaf, an extremely traditionalist Pashtun candidate and warlord who as a member of parliament was a bitter opponent of a law designed to criminalise violence against women.

Women's rights
For his part, Sayyaf said he would "reconsider his past actions in view of respect for women's rights". Most of the candidates have appeared at women's groups to answer questions, and participated in debates on women's issues.

“This time from the beginning all of them have been talking about women’s rights,” said Hasina Safi, head of the Afghanistan Women’s Network, a coalition of women’s groups. “They have really figured out that women count.”

Partly that is because women have become particularly well- organised in recent years, nurtured by generous international funding for their organisations and causes, and requirements by donors that projects should be gender-sensitive, with such measures as equal opportunity units, gender equality training, and guaranteed jobs for a percentage of women.

That has helped improve their political clout, despite disappointing results in voter registration drives. The actual percentage of women registered to vote has not changed appreciably – about 35 percent of the total – since previous elections.

But tougher controls on voting will make illegal proxy voting – where men especially in conservative areas cast the votes allotted to the adult women in their households – harder to get away with.

And with years of set-asides for women running for parliament and provincial council seats, women have become accustomed to some share of the power. Provincial councils are also being contested in the vote on Saturday, with 20 per cent of the seats set aside for women.

Some 300 women are running for such seats nationwide, which the independent election commission says is the highest number ever. Even in conservative Kandahar province, a tenth of the candidates are women.

"Today, you can now say that a woman's vote is going for a woman," Sarobi told a crowd of more than 1,000 women in Kabul on Monday. Many women are quick to caution that they still have a long way to go. "Where are their first ladies?" said Zahra Mosawi, a rights advocate. "We have only seen one of the presidential candidates' wives so far." She was talking about Ashraf Ghani, one of the front-runners, who had his wife, Rula, join him to make a campaign speech, another Afghan campaign first.

His running mate, the Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, also brought his wife, Zabaida, along to talk to a group of women at one campaign meeting.

Disappointment
One disappointment among women's advocates has been Karzai's refusal to allow his wife, Zeenat Karzai, to make public appearances. Although she is one of Afghanistan's most famous women, so few Afghans have ever seen her that it is said she can go shopping without bodyguards.

Before her husband became president, Zeenat Karzai was a practicing gynaecologist, and activists felt she would make a powerful role model for a generation of girls who were finally allowed full schooling in Afghanistan. Instead, she has remained in seclusion over the past decade and some feel that has reinforced the traditional view of Afghan women as subservient, forbidden to go out without their husbands’ permission.

When Zeenat Karzai registered to vote for the first time, in 2004, it was done in private.

“He promised so many times to bring his wife out and he never did,” said Mariam Nabizada, a Kabul political activist for Rassoul’s campaign and for Sarobi. Now that issue no longer looms so large, she said: “With a female running mate, it has encouraged more women than ever to participate.”

Suspicious
Still, Afghan women are suspicious about what is to come after Western officials turn away from Afghanistan, and about what agenda the country's political power players are truly pursuing. Particularly worrisome, to Mosawi and other women, has been the refrain from many of the presidential candidates of the need to make peace with the Taliban, whose government famously confined women to their homes and banned them from most work.

"They're all talking about peace with the Taliban, which is a big danger for us," she said. "We're not hearing assurances about preserving all the achievements of women in these years." Many women are quick to note that little has changed outside of the cities; in rural Afghanistan, where most women live, women are still little more than the property of their brothers, fathers and husbands. A victory for Sarobi and other candidates would certainly help, Wardak said. "If women do as well as they hope in this election it will be a huge self-esteem boost." – ( New York Times service)