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KANDAHAR (Afghanistan): Framed by her blue shawl, the solemn, bespectacled face of Serena Faizi peers out from anelection campaignposter at a Kandahar city roundabout, while Afghanistan approaches its own crossroads as Western troops prepare to go home.

When theUnited Statesfirst deployed forces inAfghanistanto fight the Taliban and hunt Osama bin Laden, Faizi was barely a teenager.

Having grown up in a city on the front line of the insurgency, she has entered politics, the most dangerous arena of all for a woman in Afghanistan. She is beginning political life just as the West, which has championed womens rights, has begun to disengage.

While the country awaits the outcome of the larger contest to see who succeeds Hamid Karzai as president after 12 years in power, Faizi is awaiting results of the April 5 election to find out whether she has won a seat in Kandahars provincial council.

Contesting meant becoming a potential target for the Taliban. Police insisted on giving her an armed escort home on the night of the ballot as the risk became more real.

I was scared, admitted Faizi, a formermedia relations officerin the provincial governors administration.

We are like a challenge. They tell me: Serena, you cant do that. I say: I can, she told Reuters in rapid-fire English perfected through lessons taken over Skype.

If men can do it, women can also do the same thing.

Named New Generation and campaigning for equal rights for women, Faizi says her political movement has only a few hundred followers, but they are determined to take on reactionary Afghan attitudes to women by seeking to be both seen and heard.

Some of credit for that sense of empowerment must go to the promotion of democracy and education for girls, which became hallmarks of U.S. policy in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.

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Afghan women stand to be counted as West begins to disengage