Afghanistan

The Canadian-funded textbooks and computers aren't overly expensive — certainly not compared to the price Afghan women risk having to pay for using them.

The sort of mundane learning most westerners have long taken for granted carries a persistent and very real threat for female students in southern Afghanistan: injury or death at the hands of the Taliban.

For the determined, however, it's no deterrent.

Taliban gunmen have killed the headteacher of a girls' school near the Afghan capital after he ignored warnings to stop teaching girls, government officials have said.

Khan Mohammad, the head of the Porak girls' school in Logar province, was shot dead near his home on Tuesday, said Deen Mohammad Darwish, a spokesman for the Logar governor.

"He was killed because he wanted to run the school," Darwish said.

After the US killing of Osama bin Laden on May 1, the organization Women for Afghan Women reported an eerie quiet in Kabul, the capital of strife-torn Afghanistan.

It is the malaria season in Khan Neshin, the wild south of Helmand, just 50 miles from the border with Pakistan.

Mosquitoes thrive in the fetid pools along the river. In the dry fields the last of the poppy harvest is being gathered - and this year it's a bumper crop.

As Afghanistan looks to a future without U.S. troops, the Kabul government says reconciling with the Taliban is critical to making peace after nearly 10 years of war. Some human rights activists are concerned that reconciliation could lead to a return of the repressive conditions they suffered during Taliban rule.

Foreign troops must do more to prevent growing rights abuses by Afghan forces including killings and child sex abuse as they prepare to hand over security, a leading charity warned Tuesday.

Sima Samar receives a threatening phone call almost every day because she dares to say women should have rights and murderers should face justice.

The harassment is not from Taliban rebels, but from the former warlords of Hamid Karzai's western-bankrolled government who want her silenced.

An all-female delegation of women from Paktika province convened for the first time April 25, 2011. Influential female Afghan representatives, like the director of women's affairs, or DoWA, for Paktika, attended.

"It is my responsibility to reach out and help the women and to let them know they have rights," said Bibi Hawa, Paktika director of women's affairs.

Sadly, it is not surprising that Afghanistan is again ranked as the worst place in the world to be a mother, according to Save the Children's annual State of the World's Mothers report, released Tuesday.