On the same day Rangina Hosala decided to run as a candidate in Afghanistan's upcoming parliamentary elections, she sat down at her kitchen table and wrote her memoirs, convinced she was going to die.
The Taliban sent her threats by text message: Quit now or we will kill you. Her children begged her to withdraw from the race; instead she smashed her cell phone.
For now, the middle-aged mother of seven is keeping her candidacy a secret in Kandahar. She hopes by the time elections roll around in September, this city will have changed so she can campaign, unless the insurgents find her first.
"I am hope things will improve. For now, I am scared from every place, from every person," Ms. Hosala says, removing a billowing green burqa to reveal a face etched with worry over fears a white Toyota Corolla might have followed her to the guesthouse where the interview is conducted.
Those hopes, hemmed by raw fear, represent the current paradox of Kandahar city.
Optimism among officials
NATO has promised that by August, its surge of 30,000 American troops in the south, armed with a new counterinsurgency strategy and backed by an Afghan government that vows reform, will succeed in wrestling control of Kandahar city back from Taliban insurgents, just in time for parliamentary elections.
But these days it feels like the insurgents hold the upper hand. Any lingering sense of security in Kandahar city has been shattered by a series of assassinations, bombings and kidnappings.
The recent violence has shaken people and undermined confidence that security will improve at a time when public support for the coalition's effort is considered most crucial.
Instead, there is a growing sense of fear and frustration among civilians that stands in stark contrast to the momentum the military is building on the ground.
Last week, the United Nations withdrew some of its foreign staff from the city and ordered the rest to stay home. The deputy provincial police chief narrowly escaped assassination several days after the deputy mayor was shot dead at a mosque while he prayed. That same day, insurgents detonated a remote-controlled bomb strapped to a donkey near the house of a tribal chief allied with the Afghan president. Three school-aged children were killed.
On Friday, General David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central command, warned Kandahar residents of a violent summer ahead, predicting "horrific" actions by the insurgents.
"We know that there will be more tough moments in the weeks and months ahead," the general said at a press conference in Kandahar city.
Afghan officials, however, remained remarkably upbeat.
"There may be some more bad days and there may be some more good days, but to me Kandahar means Afghanistan. The fight is worth it," said Tooryalai Wesa, the former Canadian academic who, as provincial governor, is almost certainly marked for death by the Taliban.
Mr. Wesa spends his days meeting with tribal elders in remote districts of Panjwai, Nakhonay and Zahri, hoping to convince them of the merits of NATO's mission here. Ultimately the campaign hopes to lure low-level Taliban foot soldiers away from the insurgency.
At the shuras, he promises villagers, and anyone else listening, that when the insurgency melts away, good governance will flourish, providing jobs, schools and security.
He believes the Taliban is retreating, dismissing recent violence as "sporadic bursts of terrorism."
Progress has been made, he insists: "When the West first came here, nobody thought the Afghan police would ever wear a uniform. Now they are all in uniform," he said.
"I am optimistic security will be restored by the end of August," he added.
Despair on the streets
But the message is lost on many Kandaharis, reluctant to commit their support because they unsure whether the Taliban will ever disappear for good - or how long the West will stay.
The simmering violence has forced even Mr. Wesa to change his routine. These days, he only travels by U.S. helicopter. When he is in Kandahar city, he rarely leaves his compound, a garrisoned oasis of flower gardens, manicured grass and marble buildings that are mostly deserted.
Last week, the mayor and his family moved in for protection. More than half of his 70 city office staff no longer shows up for work.
"I got a phone call, telling me not to go to work or office or home, but where I else can I go," wondered mayor Ghulam Haider Hamidi.
The city's one million residents - the population considered to be the ultimate prize of this war - remain suspended between the future prosperity they have been promised and the daily terror that now rules their lives.
As NATO forces bolstered by incoming troops work to expand a ring of stability in the countryside, there are increasing signs the insurgents are simply regrouping in the city, falling back to their spiritual home to brace for the upcoming battle, considered the most significant of the eight-year war.
Confrontation looms
Meanwhile, military commanders no longer refer to the upcoming operation as an offensive, describing it instead with the gentler phrase: "rising tide."
The subtlety is lost in translation. Kandaharis still tend to blame the West, either for failing to contain the insurgents in the first place or for inviting further fighting into their streets.
"They promised us security but they have not brought it," laments Hajji Sader Mohammad, a withered 62-year old man who was perched on a plastic chair, drinking tea, dust swirling around his leathery feet.
This year, he is unable to harvest plums and pomegranates from his orchards because the Taliban accused him of collaborating with the government, noting his land is located behind the Sarpoza prison, a provincial institution.
"I am scared from all fighting. I don't care from where it is coming," he says, gesturing toward a handful of Afghan police erecting a makeshift checkpoint with orange pylons further down the street.
Ahmed Wali Karzai, the powerful head of Kandahar's provincial council and the Afghan president's half brother, believes the Taliban has succeeding in driving a wedge between residents of Kandahar city, the West and the Afghan government.
"The Taliban has decided to cripple the government by killing employees. They want to create distance between Afghans and the international forces. If someone is working as an interpreter, they will kill them," Mr. Karzai says, speaking to The Globe in his Kandahar city guesthouse, on a street closed to most traffic.
He denounced the UN's decision to pull back its staff.
"They could have done it quietly, gone on vacation for a week or two. Instead the population feels as though they have been abandoned," he says.
A population under siege
While the Taliban's most brazen attacks tend to target high-profile Kandaharis, the city's poor have also suffered in more subtle but devastating ways.
Abdul Bahri, a barrel-chested 52-year-old father of eight, was forced to quit his job as a generator operator at an NGO earlier this year, after he found a night letter posted on the gate outside his home.
"Please do not work with NGOs or Christians," it read in Pashto. "Leave the job or we will kill you."
Desperate for the salary of $220 a month, he ignored the warning. The following week, a bearded man on a motorcycle approached his 10-year-old daughter, Nassima, while she was playing on the street. The man handed her an envelope addressed to Mr. Bahri.
The note inside was entitled "Last Warning" with a phone number provided should he have any questions. Mr. Bahri called. The man who answered calmly explained if he didn't follow the Taliban's "policy" he would die.
Today, he cobbles together a meagre living working construction, earning half of what he was paid by the NGO. It is barely enough to feed his children, he says, cradling his head in calloused hands.
"More troops, less troops, it is not a solution," he says. "The problem is coming from the nests of the Taliban."
Privately, some Afghan officials worry time has already run out, that the problems here run too deep and that plans for the parliamentary elections, an unofficial barometer of the mission here, are wildly optimistic.
"It's pure delusion," one government official says.
Meanwhile, Ms. Hosala, the would-be lawmaker, nervously twists her purple head scarf, as she speaks of how she hopes to help the women of Kandahar city if she wins a parliamentary seat.
During Taliban rule, she remained because she was too poor to leave with relatives who fled to Pakistan. She worked in a clinic, vaccinating women against disease three days a month. Eventually she attended teachers college.
When the insurgency receded in the aftermath of the American-led invasion, she combed the countryside, convincing husbands to let their women work and fathers to send their girls to school. Slowly she saw attitudes change.
But the hard-fought progress she made in those early years has receded. Today, in some Taliban-controlled neighbourhoods of Kandahar city, only 20 per cent of girls attend school.
Still, she is convinced her resilience can restore hope, if only she is given the chance. Her family no longer supports her candidacy, but she refuses to pull out of the race and forfeit her dream.
"I am like a mountain," she declares, before donning her burqa and stepping back into the streets, where she desperately hoped to go unnoticed.