A Girls' School Among the Taliban

Are you going to school? An everyday question that became a once-in-a-lifetime horror for students of Mirwais Mena School for Girls in Afghanistan, who were attacked with battery acid by masked Taliban members last fall. Veteran New York Times war correspondent Dexter Filkins returns to the town outside Kandahar where the girls live to check in on how they've recovered. With Afghanis voting Thursday to elect their next president, Filkins finds "one unambiguously positive change" in a country with few reasons to be optimistic about the future: the education of girls. In the last eight years, the number of girls receiving schooling has grown from nearly zero to 2.6 million. But Filkins' story is not a completely happy one, as he confronts the complex politics which prevent a family from accepting the charity that he has come to offer.