Female Afghan presidential candidate speaks on war and women's rights

Fawzia Koofi, a current member of the Afghan parliament and the sole female presidential candidate in the country’s 2014 election, spoke on the importance of continued intervention by foreign countries and the necessity of attaining a democratic government for Afghanistan to an audience in Robertson Hall on Tuesday night.

Koofi began by noting that when she first visited Princeton in 2009, Afghanistan was a priority for United States and its exit strategy was still “just a baby.” Three years later, perspectives have changed, and Afghanistan may not be a favorable agenda anymore for world leaders like President Obama, she said.

It is also difficult for the international community to truly understand the realities of Afghanistan, Koofi noted, because the mass media is usually caught up in reporting suicide bombings and killings, ultimately presenting “another face” of the nation.

“We also try to talk about problems to get attention; we talk less about progress,” Koofi said, noting that there have been huge social changes in recent times that have gone largely unnoticed by the international media. “The Afghanistan of now is not the Afghanistan of 2001 or the Afghanistan of 1996, when the Taliban controlled people, ruling over women as they wanted.”

Koofi claimed that she doesn’t “buy the argument” that democracy doesn’t work in Afghanistan. “No matter where in Afghanistan, a mother wants her daughter to go to school,” she said. Koofi said she was the first girl from her family and community to be educated.

And it’s not foreign forces like the United States or Europe that are imposing this change of thought, Koofi said. The “people of Afghanistan have progressed and would like to live in a situation where there is democracy, a minimum standard of life, where people have a voice, freedom of speech, a government that is more responsible and a young generation that goes to school,” she said.

Koofi emphasized that the world was blind to the plight of Afghanistan until it became a “common cause” for the international community after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

“Before 2001, [the] people of Afghanistan were screaming that we are a victim of terrorism,” Koofi said. “Nobody was listening. The whole world was ignoring and saying it’s a civil war and that it [Afghanistan] has to deal with it. It was only in 2001 when the September 11 attack happened. And the whole world came to this understanding that we have to do something about that part of the world.”

She said that the international community and Afghanistan have made several mistakes so far. One of these mistakes, Koofi noted, was that the international community has sent large sums of money to Afghanistan without a prioritized agenda for its use, resulting in corruption and continued support for a centralized system, rather than decentralization of political and financial power.

Koofi went on to emphasize that the war against terror in Afghanistan continues to be a global-scale conflict and that she hopes the United States will stay involved because “history will repeat itself” if the international community turns away from Afghanistan.

“I know that perhaps it will be very difficult for me to convince the American public to continue to stay engaged in Afghanistan while you have lost many jobs, while you are suffering with your own economic problems,” Koofi said. “But in the meantime, I want to make the case that it’s not only an Afghan war.”

Koofi said she does not see an alternative to democracy. The plight of the Afghan people cannot be improved without a strong, accountable elected government, she said.

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Hopefully, with the continued support of the international community, Afghanistan can develop from being a “country that gets donations” to a “country that is a rival partner in the world,” Koofi said.