Women, citizens, Muslims: Afghan women assert their human rights in the context of Islam, not in opposition to it.

On December 13, 2003, 502 members of Afghanistan's constitutional Grand Council, or loya jirga, met in the capital, Kabul, to begin writing the document that would henceforth shape governance of an Islamic, representative democracy. Three weeks later, after at least two rocket attacks near the council's meeting place and even more explosive politicking among the council's members, the council emerged with a new constitution.

Among those who watched the process with attention were Afghan women and their activist partisans in other parts of the world, who wanted the new constitution explicitly to reflect the rights and needs of women. They had particular reason to worry that the assembly gathered in Kabul would be hijacked by conservative extremists who would interpret women's rights narrowly using religion as an excuse, or who might eliminate mentions of women's human rights altogether.

The Grand Council met just two years after the United States toppled the Taliban, the extremist party that had been in control of Afghanistan's capital since 1996. The American objective was to destabilize a regime that had given refuge to Osama bin Laden and the leaders of Al Qaeda, whose bases were in Afghanistan. At that time, the United States linked its military agenda in Afghanistan with the need to liberate Afghan women from oppression. As First Lady Laura Bush put the matter in a national radio address in November 2001, "The brutal oppression of women is a central goal of the terrorists. Long before the current war began, the Taliban and its terrorist allies were making the lives of children and women in Afghanistan miserable." The first lady went on to assert that the removal of the Taliban from power would mean the …