This is Massooda Jalal. She is important.

She is important because she is running for president.

Of Afghanistan.

A woman is running for president of a country that was in control of an extremist organization that would beat women in the streets if they were unescorted or mistakingly showed a flash of ankle jumping over a mudpuddle.

Listen to the Feminists for Bush crow! (*crickets chirping*)

The press, of course, is putting the worst possible spin on the election and totally ignoring the triumph that this picture represents.

The AFP:

Campaigning for next month’s presidential election in Afghanistan began, opening a race in which a war-weary and ethnically-divided people will choose their leader for the first time.

How depressing! How about a race in which a budding democracy in a newly-freed nation will come together to choose a leader for the first time!

Eighteen candidates including US-backed incumbent Hamid Karzai are running in the October 9 vote, which will fall three years after the United States unleashed a military assault to destroy the Taliban regime for harbouring Osama bin Laden after the September 11 attacks.

“Unleashed a military assault to destroy”! How about “freed millions of oppressed people and is helping to rebuild a shattered nation”?

CNN says that “Afghanistan braces for poll test“. How ominous!

Election officials in Afghanistan have announced the start of nationwide campaigning for the troubled nation’s October 9 presidential election.

Yes, that poor “troubled nation”, free from war, Islamic extremism, invaders, and so on.

The Associated Press is even worse:

Afghanistan’s historic election campaign got under way Tuesday, pitting 17 hopefuls against interim leader Hamid Karzai in the race to become the impoverished country’s first popularly elected president.

The U.S.-backed incumbent inaugurated a rare new factory and promised to help Afghans out of poverty, while the lone female challenger wowed widows with a tirade against warlords.

“Impoverished”. “Rare new factory”. “Poverty”. “Lone female challenger”. Still poor and oppressed. No word on the growing industry, the fact that trade is resuming, that schools are open, that the press is again free.

But the danger that violence could mar a contest supposed to cement the country’s recovery since the ouster of the ruling Taliban militia in 2001 was underlined by fresh battles with militants in the south that killed at least seven people.

Ah yes, seven people dead overshadow a nation. How depressing!

Reuters, of course, turns it into a test of Bush’s leadership:

The official campaign for Afghanistan’s first ever direct presidential election, seen as a test of U.S.-led nation-building efforts after the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban, opened to little fanfare on Tuesday.

Taliban guerrillas reiterated a vow to disrupt the Oct. 9 U.N.-sponsored poll, which President Bush hopes will go smoothly ahead of his own election show-down in early November….

Bush sent U.S. forces into Afghanistan in 2001 to overthrow the hardline Islamic regime after it refused to hand over al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden following the Sept. 11 attacks.

Yep. Bush sent the troops — Congress had nothing to do with it. Bush is doing the “nation building” thing. All Bush. If people die at the polls it will be all his fault. And nary a word will be spoken about the fact that three years ago women were being executed in soccer fields in between showings of men having body parts cut off.

Not that these things aren’t important to remember. But the press predictably ignores the triumph of eighteen people running for president in free and open democratic elections in a nation that is struggling to pull itself from the very pits of hell.

Congratulations, Afghanistan. And God speed!