Like teenage girls giddy about a boy band, a swarm of flag-carrying young men surged towards the elevated stage, set against the green hills of Afghanistan's northern province of Kunduz. The youths' idol sat on a sofa chewing gum. Between them and him was a waterless ditch, 12 feet (four metres) deep, carved out of the sandy soil. By the end of the campaign rally, the idol's surging mass of admirers had pushed quite a few of their number into the ditch, from where they could be pulled out only with the help of their flagpoles.
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