Women and Warlords

To the Bush bunch, an election seems to equal "democracy." Yet five months after elections in Iraq, that country has no government. And nine months after parliamentary elections in Afghanistan, it's unclear who the new legislature represents and where it's headed.

I recently visited the Afghan Parliament, just finishing its third month in session, to interview twenty members of the lower house who seem to many Afghans to be the last, best hope for a democratic future. They are certainly not typical. Standard issue parliamentarians are familiar mujahedeen commanders and cronies previously defeated, discredited and driven from the country. But these twenty parliamentarians are different: They're women.

Trumpeted as "the first democratically elected Parliament in over thirty years," this one was planned at the December 2001 Bonn conference that followed the fall of the Taliban, and was brought into being at fabulous expense by an army of some 130,000 internationally paid election workers. The United States' inexplicable pressure to invite those mujahedeen commanders to Bonn plays out now in a Parliament where every other member is a former jihadi, and nearly half are affiliated with fundamentalist or traditionalist Islamist parties, including the Taliban.

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