Like most Afghans, Noorjahan Akbar has lived through some hard times. She still has nightmares about a vivid and frightening incident she witnessed when she was about 3 years old: a warlord's gunmen kidnapped two of her female playmates right off the street in front of her. Not long afterward, the warlord confiscated her house. Some two years later, the Taliban seized Kabul from those mujahedin warlords in heavy fighting, forcing her secular family to flee to northern Afghanistan and finally to Peshawar in Pakistan.
After spending two years attending high school near Philadelphia, Akbar returned to Afghanistan this summer to visit her family, which had moved back to Kabul, and to study her real passion: Afghan women's folk music. But Akbar, an avid amateur singer herself and a champion of women's rights, quickly got caught up in the country's presidential-election campaign on the side of former finance minister Ashraf Ghani, one of 40 candidates challenging incumbent president Hamid Karzai in Thursday's election. The liberal, urbane, squeaky-clean former World Bank official, who resigned from Karzai's cabinet in 2004 alleging corruption and mismanagement, appealed to Akbar's strong desire for change, gender and ethnic equality, good governance, and practical solutions for war-torn Afghanistan's complex problems. (She loved his 2008 book, Fixing Failed States.)
What's more, Ghani reminds her of her father, an Arab-Afghan intellectual who is a writer and researcher on political, social, and religious affairs. "Ghani is a liberal man," Akbar, 18, told NEWSWEEK as she sat on the floor in the book-lined study of her father's modest mud-brick house on the outskirts of Kabul. "Most powerful and influential Afghans don't think; they just talk without offering any solutions," she says, wearing a pink-and-black-checked frock over black pants with a white headscarf covering her hair. "Dr. Ghani has solutions on how to save Afghanistan from the terrible situation that we live in today, including a 10-year plan to bring peace, jobs, development and equality, even for handicapped people."
If this sounds like the romance of a true believer, it is. Akbar has been so busy organizing 50 other young people to canvas for Ghani"”not only in Kabul but in northern Afghanistan as well"”that she nearly gave up her study of folk music. The volunteers are part of a growing cadre of young idealists who have fallen behind Ghani's campaign, despite his likely loss to Karzai. Akbar calls them a "youth awareness movement." It's a phenomenon Westerners are used to seeing in their political campaigns, from Tony Blair to Howard Dean. But this is a very new trend in Afghan politics. "Ghani's message has motivated youth like me from around the country," Akbar says. "This is the first time in Afghan history that something like this has happened. It's amazing and admirable."
What's new, she says, is that Ghani's movement has, for the first time, made young Afghans feel like they can bring about change by working for an honest candidate. It's a rebuttal of the patronage politics, nepotism, and horse-trading that always seemed to characterize secular governance here, and a suggestion that warlords with militias and poppy fields (who have killed with impunity and robbed the country blind) needn't run the country.
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