Afghan women at the peace table

True, Afghanistan will need plenty of visionary male leaders - as well as massive international support - if it is ever to turn from the path of war to that of security, development, and peace. But Afghan women leaders will play a special role in helping to bring hope and peace to their country - and the time to start empowering them to do that is now. During the coming weeks and months, here's what President Bush and other world leaders should do:

• Continue meeting with respected Afghan women leaders - at all levels, including the highest. Afghan women should be included in mixed-gender leadership meetings, as well as, possibly, some women-only meetings. And if their menfolk object to such meetings? Tough! This is the way the international community (that is, after all, helping free all Afghans from the curse of the Taliban) intends to operate in the 21st century.

• Definitely, reject the findings of any supposed Afghan popular consultations from which the views and votes of women have been excluded. Women's voices must always be sought, always included.

• Make awareness of gender issues an integral part of all peacekeeping and aid efforts. The UN's Afghanistan team needs urgently to fill the long-empty post of gender adviser. Washington's Afghanistan team needs to appoint its own high-level gender adviser - and then listen to her carefully.

• Channel significant resources to female-empowerment programs at all levels. Girls and young women need special help in education. Groups distributing aid should work with, and help to strengthen, women's mutual-support and political networks in all Afghan communities.

• Use the winter months, while physical and political rebuilding are still difficult, to brainstorm with Afghan women on how they want their society rebuilt and how they want to contribute to that.

• Plan for broad training in productive skills for the millions of Afghans who either have not had recent access to the workplace (women), or have acquired skills only in military arts (men). Demobilization and empowerment of women are parallel processes, and the groundwork for them can be laid now.

• Budget serious bucks for all the above.

A tall order? Yes. Intrusive? Maybe.

But we have a historic opportunity to help Afghans shake off the shackles of their recent past - shackles of distrust, poverty, militarization, and misogyny. Either we work proactively with Afghan women and men to shake off those ills - or else, five or 10 years ahead, what further horrors should we expect for (and from) Afghanistan?

Helena Cobban is a veteran journalist and author of five books on international issues.

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