My parents told me to keep coming to school even if I am killed

International Herald Tribune reported If the acid attacks against Shamsia and 14 other students and teachers, which carried the tell-tale marks of the Taliban, were meant to terrorize the girls into staying home, they appear to have failed completely. Today, nearly all of the wounded girls are back at the Mirwais School for Girls, including Shamsia, whose face was so badly burnt that she had to be sent abroad for treatment. Perhaps even more remarkable, nearly every other female student in this deeply conservative community has returned as well - about 1,300 in all.

I wish them well.

"My parents told me to keep coming to school even if I am killed," Shamsia, 17, said in a moment after class.

Compare this, where parents love their children so much that they want them to get an education, even if it means risking their lives, to the parents in Gaza, who send their children to a school where they are taught at a very young age to be willing to become suicide bombers in order to kill Jews.

Shamsia's mother, like nearly all of the adult women in the area, is unable to read or write. "The people who did this to me don't want women to be educated. They want us to be stupid things."

That is precisely what they want. They consider girls the property of their father, before they are married, and property of their husband, once they are married, in an arranged marriage when they are very young.

In the five years since the Mirwais School for Girls was built here by the Japanese government, it appears to have sparked something of a social revolution. Even as the Taliban tighten their noose around Kandahar, the girls flock to the school each morning. Many of them walk more than three kilometers, or two miles, from their mud-brick houses up in the hills.

How many kids in the US walk 2 miles to school. And they don't have to worry about people spraying acid in the faces of the girls.

The girls burst through the school's walled compound, many of them flinging off head-to-toe garments, bounding, cheering and laughing in ways that are inconceivable outside - for females of any age. In Mirwais's muddy byways, there is no regular electricity, no running water, no paved streets. Women are rarely seen, and only then while clad in burqas that make their bodies shapeless and their faces invisible.