Mick Hartley

The face of what Afghanistan could be:

Violence has shadowed Fawzia Koofi since her childhood in the wild mountains of northern Afghanistan.

She saw her father beat her mother if the dinner rice was not fluffy enough. She lost her father, brother and husband to the country’s successive wars, insurgencies and Taliban dictatorship.

As a member of parliament since 2005, she has lived with death threats and survived assassination attempts. An aide, the district manager in her re-election campaign this year, was murdered a few months ago.

But this is not what Ms. Koofi, now 35 and one of the country’s most outspoken democracy activists, wants her children to know. It is, at least, not the only story she wants to tell about her life and her country.

“I want to tell to the world, as a woman who has lived through all the situations, that women can make a difference,” she says. “I want to show how strong Afghan women are.”  […]

As she related these bits of memories in an interview at a hilltop hotel in Kabul, Ms. Koofi looked down at the rebuilt sprawling Polytechnic University and its adjacent library. Both had been burned in the civil war between rival mujahedeen groups.

At one time, as a girl with dreams, she had wanted to go there. She had watched the buildings burn. Only a few years later, she was forced to stop attending medical school when the Taliban banned the education of women and girls.

Her own daughters wear jeans, go to school and have travelled with her outside the country. They can barely picture, she says, the life she lived as a girl and young woman.

More on Fawzia Koofi from Terry Glavin.