“I am voting today to secure my grandchildren’s future,” said an octogenarian woman waiting in line at a polling station in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i Sharif. Throughout the day, Afghan media continuously showed live footage of voters standing in long lines: Old men leaning on their canes, women of all ages, first-time young voters, people from all walks of life and hailing from all of Afghanistan’s ethnic groups. The 2014 presidential and provincial council elections opened at 7am on a cold and drizzling morning in Kabul, amid heavy security measures prompted by three deadly attacks the previous week and a Taliban threat to voters. Thousands of people had queued at polling stations at dawn, right after morning prayer. The air was filled with enthusiasm, hope and a kind of energy that I had only felt on Nowruz 2002, the first Afghan New Year’s Day after the fall of the Taliban. Twelve years later, however, there was an added aura of determination and defiance. My parents’ generation experienced this kind of euphoria in October 1964, when at the behest of the last Afghan king, Zahir Shah, a new Afghan Constitution had changed absolute monarchy to a constitutional one and had started what is known in contemporary Afghan history as the “decade of democracy”.
My parents’ generation experienced this kind of euphoria in October 1964, when at the behest of the last Afghan king, Zahir Shah, a new Afghan Constitution had changed absolute monarchy to a constitutional one and had started what is known in contemporary Afghan history as the ‘decade of democracy’.
The 1960s were marked with the measured transformation of Afghan society. The multifaceted development agenda produced a better educated elite with various ideological convictions. For the first time, women entered the public sphere in increasingly larger numbers, whether as cabinet ministers, parliamentarians or judges.
The hitherto conservative society did not react in a dramatic manner “because the political elite in Kabul was acting from a high moral ground and truly believed in those reforms”, insisted my grandmother, who after shedding the “chadari”, an all-enveloping veil that also covers the face, went on to be an active member of Afghanistan’s first women’s volunteer organisation.
Full Article: Afghan elections: The morning after – Opinion – Al Jazeera English.