Afghanistan’s Fawzia Koofi will stand in presidential elections

http://www.thestar.com

Popular female MP has launched a campaign website ahead of 2014 elections with a platform supporting women's rights and opposing corruption.

There are two Afghanistans, old and new. The old Afghanistan was the front line of the war on terror, manned by thousands of western soldiers fighting to prop up the government in Kabul and bankrolled by billions of dollars in aid money. But the war’s battlefields have shifted elsewhere. The new Afghanistan faces an unknown future. Fed up with a decade of military misadventures, NATO and the Pentagon are planning a fast exit as Taliban insurgents step up their attacks. Aid money is drying up, and Afghans with connections or cash are leaving for Dubai. But there is a flash in the dark, a sign that the Afghanistan project perhaps wasn’t a failure. Popular MP Fawzia Koofi has declared her intention to run for president. She has launched a campaign website ahead of next year’s elections with the slogan “the voice of hope for the future of Afghanistan” and a platform of supporting women’s rights and opposing corruption. The educational opportunities available to young women over the past decade of western intervention have brought social change, Koofi, 38, told American political satirist Jon Stewart on his television show last week. “With all the changes that have happened I give myself all the eligibility to run for president,” she said confidently, to rapturous applause. Koofi is feted in the West. She is invited to speak at august think-tanks such as Chatham House in London, was a guest of the first lady at George W. Bush’s state of the union address in 2006, and was selected as a young global leader at the World Economic Forum in 2009. But her life story is quintessentially Afghan. Born in a village in northern Badakhshan province, she was left to die in a field because her mother, with seven other mouths to feed, could not look after her, Koofi writes in her new book The FavoredDaughter. But her mother took pity and saved her. Like the majority of her compatriots, Koofi has suffered appalling hardship at the hands of all players in the country’s conflicted past, which contributes to her mass appeal. The mujahideen killed her father, an MP for 25 years, before the 1979 Soviet invasion. Her husband died in 2003 of tuberculosis he had contracted in a Taliban prison, leaving her to look after their two daughters. Koofi studied in Pakistan and after the American invasion in 2001 got a job with UNICEF in Kabul. She launched her political career in the capital but returned north to campaign for a seat in the 2005 parliamentary elections in the villages where her mother and siblings once ran for their lives along the riverbanks from mujahideen gunmen. To women she had an immediate appeal. Her male constituents remembered that her politician father built an important road across a treacherous mountain pass, she wrote. Koofi won by a landslide in both the 2005 and 2010 elections. Afghanistan has its own ancient democratic traditions, not a House of Commons but local jirgas where community leaders are selected by consensus, she wrote in her book. “America has supported democracy but in no way forced it upon us,” she wrote. In her memoir she included earnest letters to her daughters about the importance of her duties as an MP, even on mornings when long lines of people waited at her front door looking for help. “This is a lesson I want you to learn,” she wrote. “Never turn anyone away from your door because you never know when you need to throw yourself at the mercy of another.” Since she became a national figure, Koofi has survived several assassination attempts, including a 30-minute assault on her armed convoy while she cowered in the back of her car. She travels with eight bodyguards. Is Afghanistan ready for a female president? “She may lose at elections but she will win the fight for Afghan women and the fight for democracy, and I think that is a much bigger cause than winning an election,” said Barry Salaam, a political analyst in Kabul. “We have got to support her as best as we can because her fight is not just for herself but for our entire country.” The Atlantic magazine, which named her as one of 2012’s Brave Thinkers, put it another way: “In Afghanistan, the only noble causes left are the lost ones.”