One candidate, a writer recently returned from exile in Paris to run for president, spoke out against polygamy and campaigned for women to have a voice in divorce. This was more than a political issue, and mullahs called for his disqualification as a candidate, citing his "blasphemy." Eighty years ago, an Afghan king was forced into exile when he banned polygamy and advocated the education of women. Change is difficult.
Among the original 18 candidates for president, only one was a woman, but that's a start. A quarter of the new parliament to be elected next spring must be female.
Robina Muqimyar, a woman who made the team Afghanistan sent to the Athens Olympics earlier this year, finished next to last in the women's 100-meter race, but she had a longer way to go than most. She trained in Kabul Stadium, where the Taliban once hanged Afghan men from the goal posts for their amusement.
The presidential election in Afghanistan can rightly be regarded as a remarkable victory in the war against terrorism and the struggle to establish democracy in a backward part of the world, but it's also a breakthrough for women struggling to rise above narrow male chauvinism embedded in a particularly backward version of an ancient religion.
"Just three years ago, women were being executed in the sports stadium," says President Bush. "Today they're voting for a leader of a free country." The emancipation of women in the Middle East, as Bernard Lewis, the distinguished scholar of Islamic culture, observes, "is the touchstone of difference between modernization and Westernization."
More than a million girls are now studying in Afghanistan. Their education will move the struggle for democracy forward. Most women have given up the burqa for headscarves, long dresses and pants, and that's a long way from a T-shirt that reads "Dior Not War." Americans can take a certain pride that we have contributed to their emancipation. "You've come a long way, baby."