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Hopes are being simultaneously raised and dashed for the future of women in Afghanistan.

As the recent article Afghanistan women want to be involved in Taliban peace process noted,

Women have taken on an increasingly active role in Afghan society in recent years – holding elected offices, working outside the house, and sometimes running their own organizations.

But many Afghan women see a potential peace deal with the Taliban as representing anything but a ray of hope. Current negotiation efforts have mostly excluded women, and without a voice at the table many women worry how well the Afghan government can protect women’s rights if the Taliban is reincorporated into the political system.

The hope dashers include everyone who believes religious actors are incapable of change, including Sami Yusufzai, an independent analyst in Islamabad who told Tom A. Peter of The Christian Science Monitor that the Taliban cannot be changed because “They don’t believe they can adjust with society.”

Room for Hope?

Others see hope, including Afghani women delegates to a “Loya Jirga” or “Grand Assembly” meeting last year who endorsed on-going efforts to broker a deal with the Taliban.

You may well distrust any Taliban official’s statement that the sun rose this morning, but some of those Afghani religious officials and supporters “now say that they’re more open to women’s rights than they were in the past.”

According to Peter’s report,

with regard to women’s education, Taliban supporters say that during their reign in the late 1990s, they would have supported girls’ schools, but there were not enough female teachers at the time. Now that this has changed, Taliban officials say they’re open to the idea.

Plan for Success

A local mediator and retired Superior Court Judge Alexander Williams, III, is fond of telling lawyers and their clients to “plan for success rather than failure.”

That usually means giving up an unnecessarily one-dimensional view of our adversaries and their inability to “see reason,” engage in constructive negotiations, or act in “good faith.” They, too, must give up their negative views of the “other” for the purpose of exploring interests both “sides” would be surprised to learn they had in common.

Professor R. Scott Appleby, author of The Ambivalence of the Sacred – Religion, Violence and Reconciliation has been planning for the success of religious actors to broker peace and justice for decades.