LASHKAR GAH: When Raazia Baloch, a mother of four with a thousand-watt smile, was elected to Helmand’s provincial assembly last October, local authorities congratulated her with a Kalashnikov.

“They said it was for my protection,” she said wryly. “But when I tried to fire it the bullet was stuck inside. Even that was broken.”

Politics is a rough game in Afghanistan, where last year’s landmark elections produced a crop of budding democrats, retired warlords, drug-smugglers and former Taliban fighters. For women, it is potentially fatal.

Two weeks ago inside the new national assembly in Kabul, turbaned parliamentarians hurled water bottles and bloody threats at Malalai Joya, a firebrand women deputy who dared criticised the country’s former Mujahideen. Now Ms Joya changes safe house every night and travels with three bodyguards.

The dangers are equally potent in Helmand province, 350 miles to the south. As 3,300 British troops deploy amid the worst Taliban violence in years, a small number of courageous women are leading their own campaign, armed with nothing but their voices.

Salima Sharifi was an 18-year-old pupil when she started campaigning for the provincial elections last summer. Months later she won 2,114 votes — and a place in history as Afghanistan’s youngest female politician.

“I just wanted to make a difference,” said the bookish young woman, sipping tea in a carpeted room adorned with Persian poetry. Her proud father, Muhammad Zahir, sat nearby. “I warned her it would be risky but she just smiled,” he said.

That risk is very real in Helmand, where clashes with the Taliban are becoming an almost daily event. One French soldier and 16 Afghan soldiers died and 40 other troops were injured in two firefights on Saturday.

This is an explosive province where Taliban militants torch schools and assassinate girls’ teachers.

Ms Sharifi has received several death threats, and the most recent caused her family to move house. Yet she remains undeterred. “Of course I am scared. But I am willing to make any sacrifice, even to die,” she said.

Like Ms Sharifi, Ms Baloch, 33, returned from exile in Iran after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. She was married at 12; her police officer husband died in a bombing.

She prizes education above all else. “The prophet says women should be educated. This is freedom,” she said.

But her liberal notions are tempered by local culture and gritty necessities — she sought her four brothers’ permission before standing for election, and her first daughter got married at 11.

“I was on my own and I couldn’t afford to support her any more,” she explained. Every morning the two friends don their burkas and pad through the streets of Lashkar Gah to take their seats at the provincial council, the shura.

But democracy has proved a bitter disappointment. The four women councillors meet some resistance from the 11 male councillors — mostly bearded, conservative men who declare certain subjects “not women’s business”. But the greater frustration is the shura’s impotence. “We haven’t done much to help the people,” said Ms Sharifi gloomily.

The council has only fig-leaf authority that gets little respect from underpaid and often corrupt officials.

For example, Ms Baloch said, the council once ordered that a village near Goreshk be electrified, “but when we took a letter of authorisation to the power ministry, the desk clerk tore it in two”.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service