The Taliban chopped off the index fingers of two women who braved threats of violence and cast a ballot in Afghanistan’s presidential and provincial elections Thursday. That was the word today from the country’s top monitoring group.

In Afghanistan, voters must dip their fingers in ink as they leave the polling station. This prevents a person from voting multiple times.

It used to be that way in India, too, before my homeland got a bit more high-tech. I never had an opportunity to vote in India but for years I watched my friends and relatives emerge with purplish blue stain on their fingers. Sometimes it seeped through into their nails and made it look like they had severely bruised their finger.

But never did they return home without the finger.

That, I suppose, is one difference between an established democracy — the world’s largest to be precise — and a nation that is trying so hard to be one.

I heard a report on NPR this afternoon about the difficulties of getting a job. The story focused on young people who apply for jobs and never hear back from potential employers. The commentator’s point was this: Rejection is part of life but rudeness doesn’t have to be. Take the time to write three sentences that say, “We’re sorry. We hired someone else. Good luck in your job hunt.”

I don’t have children who are entering the job market for the first time. But I have plenty of friends and a husband who are struggling to land a job after leaving the newspaper business. It’s tough for some of them; one friend announced on Facebook that he was going to a job interview for the first time in 20-odd years. Same goes for my husband.

The biggest frustration for us middle-aged folks is that we remember a time when you mailed in a job application and a person — an actual human being! — called you in a few days to say, “Thank you. We received your application and we’ll be getting in touch with you soon.”

These days, there is no one on the other end. Just a big fat computer crunching your data and spitting you out if you don’t fit the ideal candidate mold. What’s a poor middle-aged white guy to do?

This, of course, is part of our impersonal culture these days. Everyone is tuned in to their personal electronic device and tuned out to human interaction.

To this, I say: “OOOOF!” It’s a Bengali expression of frustration. My friend Saeed has been its biggest booster. So this line was for him.

But I sure do hope the phone rings at our house. One day. Very soon.

Seven people died for no reason today in Kabul.

In the scope of Afghanistan’s bloody history, seven lives are inconsequential. But the effect of today’s suicide bombing is significant. It will, to some extent, have the effect that Taliban desires: keep people away from the polls on August 20, the day of Afghanistan’s presidential elections.

One could argue that the elections mean little in a nation with so much insecurity. I always thought the vote was rather amusing in Iraq when bombs were still falling from the sky. In Afghanistan, there is the added problem of pervasive corruption and deep distrust of the government. But if there is an election, it should be a fair one. Without scare tactics.

What is important now, many Afghanistan observers believe, is to educate the next generation of Afghans; to give them what their mothers and fathers did not have. The weapon of knowledge. To read, write, be gainfully employed.

It was heartening to hear from recently returned visitors to Afghanistan that schools are bulging with students. We can simplify democracy by reducing it to the ballot. But it means little without the welfare and education of the people.

This morning, I interviewed a Kenyan man who is offering 40 goats and 20 cows in dowry for Chelsea Clinton’s hand in marriage. She would be wife no. 2 — he married a college mate, Grace, in 2006, while waiting for a response from the Clintons to his initial offer back on 2000. The dowry has remained the same. And, of course, Kenya allows polygamy.

At a Nairobi town hall session, moderator Fareed Zakaria joked with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that the offer of mariage from Godwin Kipkemoi Chepkurgur was not a bad one, given the global recession and all.

Hillary responded by saying Chelsea was her own woman.

Chepkurgur told me he remains hopeful, his admiration for the Clintons rather gushing. I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to burst his bubble. But I have a feeling Chelsea is simply not interested. Goats and cows aside.

The British are fully withdrawing from Iraq today, leaving a legacy, for the second time in a century.

They were occupiers of Iraq once before, after World War I; their dead lie still in a north Baghdad cemetery.

Now they leave 179 more dead. Their legacy this time: Basra, the southern port city and Iraq’s second most populous after Baghdad. The British, of course, have been stationed in southern Iraq, mainly in Basra, since the war began in 2003.

A lot has transpired in Basra since I last saw it in 2003 — a coalition forces “success story” that turned to utter madness under the grip of militant Shiite militias.

AJC photographer Bita Honarvar and I were there, in the last few days of our trip, drained by heat and war. We saw a baby born with its brain outside its skull. The Iraqis blamed it on the use of depleted uranium by the Americans. We did not know exactly why the baby was so deformed. All we knew is that it would not survive.

We survived on crackers and vegetarian MREs, given to us in Baghdad by 3rd Infantry Division boys. Cheese tortellini has never tasted that great again.

I remember going up to the rooftop of our hotel, where the balmy breeze off the Shatt al-Arab smacked our cheeks and blew our hair. The air smelled of the sea, so close is Basra to the Persian Gulf.

We watched day turn into night. Iran emerged before us, the lights of villages and towns twinkling before us like perfect Harry Winston diamonds.

Bita’s father, Samad, grew up here. In Abadan. I believe this was the closest she had ever been.

From all accounts, life along the mighty river, a convergence of the Tigris and Euphrates, has re-ignited. There are now parks and cafes open where Iraqis can take their families to cool off and relax.

But back then, we only had one comfort — Iraq’s famously creamy ice- cream. It was a good thing our fixer knew where to find it among the despair.

After the military ceremony, after the body comes home quietly, unseen by most of the world, after the remains forever join the earth — that’s when the suffering surfaces in ways too cruel for most of us to imagine.

I wrote in my last entry about the wretched July days of 2005 when the Army National Guard brigade I was embedded with lost eight men within a week. In al, 11 died in 11 days. Before that ugly summer finally turned cooler, more young Georgia men gave their lives in Iraq.

I covered so many of those memorials. Editors encouraged new ways to tell tales of grief. They worried the stories were all starting to sound the same. Stale.

The public salutes its heroes, then promptly goes back to leading their own lives leaving mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, sons and daughters to carry their pain in solitude. At a kitchen table at sunrise. On a long drive down a snaking country road, tall pines whispering in the night. At picnics. At shopping malls. In offices. The loss is always there.

So are lingering questions. How did he die? Did he suffer? Was it quick? Who was with him when he took his final breath? And the more difficult questions: Why?

Over the years, I have become acquainted with soldier families who suffered this acute loss. From mothers who cannot accept their only child will never return home to fathers who are adamant that their son’s death was not in vain. I spent hours with them, getting to know the intricacies of lives that are twisted and mangled forever.

I spoke with Jeff Brunson yesterday. He is the father of one of the four soldiers who died when I first arrived at Camp Striker on that blazing July day in 2005. I’ve written several times about Jeff for the newspaper –I followed him when he went to see Gus’s portrait at the Museum of Patriotism. Jeff looked into his son’s piercing blue eyes and wiped tears that fell from his own. I stood with Jeff in a Snellville drizzle and watched how among anti-war protesters, he stood proud and self-assured that his son did the right thing for his country.

I am not sure why, but Jeff and I keep in touch. He is a humble man of modest means. He volunteers at the botanical gardens in Athens and sells produce to make a living. He told me he sold 250 watermelons and 100 cantaloupes on July 4.

I visited Jeff once at his house in Bogart. We sat outside, drank sweet tea and talked about everything but Gus. But I could tell his son was there, in every word, every thought. When I got up to leave, he grabbed my arm and asked me what I knew.

In that awkward moment, I did not know what to say. I did not know if he knew details, though I suspected he did. He told me the military advised him not to open the coffin.

Jeff’s son’s battalion is now in Afghanistan. I wonder if Gus would still be a citizen soldier had he survived Iraq. But mostly, I wonder how Jeff Brunson musters the strength to carry on. And whether that awful weight of sadness will ever be lifted. Whether he will ever smile again the way he did in a treasured photo he showed me of father and son. Together.