Worldview: Rights of Afghan women must be considered in any talks with the Taliban

Fawzia Koofi, the 19th of her father's 23 children by seven wives, was put outside to die after she was born, because she was female.

Badly burned by the sun, she survived. Backed by her strong-willed, illiterate mother, she overcame the horrors of civil war and Taliban rule to become a leading member of the Afghan parliament, and a probable 2014 presidential candidate. Her gripping new memoir, The Favored Daughter: One Woman's Fight to Lead Afghanistan Into the Future, details how a determined girl surmounted impossible odds to become a voice for Afghan women and children.

So there are few better qualified than Koofi to warn about the danger that U.S. talks with the Taliban pose for Afghan women. "I have a fear," she said by phone from Kabul this week, "that we will lose the gains we have made over the past 10 years."

As Americans tire of the endless Afghan conflict, talks with the Taliban seem to offer a way out. Preliminary meetings between U.S. officials and Taliban officials have been held in recent weeks.

But given the White House commitment to bring most troops home by 2014, there seems little reason for the Taliban to compromise on core principles, including repression of women. Nor have Afghan women been given a say in setting the agenda for talks.

That gives Afghan women good reason to worry. A recent poll by the international humanitarian agency ActionAid found 86 percent of women questioned were deeply concerned at the prospect of a Taliban-influenced government. Koofi's memoir shows how much they have to lose.

She was raised in the remote province of Badakhshan, bordering China and Tajikistan, where her father was a respected political leader who was murdered at the onset of decades of Afghan civil war. Taken by her widowed mother to Kabul, she managed to get an education, only to watch her liberal-minded husband dragged off to a gruesome jail by the Taliban shortly after their marriage. In prison he contracted the tuberculosis that ultimately killed him.

"I lived in Kabul under the Taliban and I know what their attitude is like," she told me. The Taliban's return, she says, would mean "depriving women of education, forbidding them to go out of their houses." She is dubious about rumors that Taliban leaders have changed their minds about allowing girls' schools.

Koofi lives in a walled compound in Kabul (she faces constant Taliban death threats). When I visited last year, a line of desperate women waited inside to ask for her help.