Fawzia Koofi In 2014.

"My plan is to run for the presidency in 2014. One has to make a choice: I could flee to the UK or America with my daughters and watch the situation, watch my country go where the traditional leaders want, or stay here and make a small contribution. I've decided to go for the second choice."

This is no stunt. Fawzai Koofi could actually pull it off. She would need to mobilize a winning coalition of parties and politicians behind her, and that won't be easy. But there are several compelling reasons to believe she could do it.

The young MP from Badakhshan is already one of Afghanistan's most trusted politicians. She's already the deputy speaker of the Wolesi Jirga. She's a tireless worker, she's probably the most widely respected woman in Afghanistan, she's an increasingly familiar face on Afghan news and public affairs television programs, and she's enormously popular.

This will come as a surprise to people who imagine Afghanistan to be an incorrigibly misogynistic backwater, but Afghans trust women in politics. Even though women are guaranteed a 25 per cent quota of the seats in the Wolesi Jirga, many women don't need it. Female politicians tend to be poll-toppers in Afghanistan. In the recent parliamentary elections, Fawzia got more votes than any other woman in the country.

Afghans have quickly come to understand that if you want something done in Kabul, you go to a woman. It is not as though all the men in parliament are warlords and decrepit old backstairs-men who run the place like Tammany Hall, but old habits die hard. Cronyism and the bakshish traditions of the kulan naffar have persisted into Afghanistan's embryonic democracy. Women are not new to Afghan politics - women were cabinet ministers before the mujahideen wars and the Taliban time - but women represent the new way of doing politics in the country. Women are simply far less inclined to do politics the old way. Women are not warlords. Afghans aren't idiots.

4. Fawzia Koofi is properly associated with everything that is new, hopeful, honest and brave in Afghanistan. She's not a howling auld crawthumper like certain people I could mention. She stuck it out, she hung in there, and she stands up to her political adversaries in parliament without pulling her hair out and calling them ugly names. She's not for running away. She's for working, and working hard.

The absurd dysfunction at the heart of Afghan democracy is an electoral system that requires Afghan voters to navigate the maze of a "single non-transferable voting" arrangement that it shares only with Vanuatu, Jordan and the Pitcairn Islands (and upper-house votes in Thailand and Indonesia). It's a crippling disincentive to political-party organization, which exacerbates Afghanistan's other big constitutional failing: almost all power is concentrated in the presidential palace.

What all this means is there's no way you can get anything serious done in Afghanistan unless you run for president yourself, but this could actually work in Fawzia's favour. There are several alternatives to Hamid Karzai. Among them are the popular pro-democracy Massoudist Abdullah Abdullah (Karzai's closest contender in 2009) and Ashraf Ghani (famous anthro-technocrat, diplo-charmer and former World Bank mandarin). Lately, Amrullah Saleh, the formidable, articulate and principled (and thus fired) former intelligence chief, has been touted as a contender who could be Karzai's worst nightmare. But if they all run against each other, they all lose.

The great tragedy of Hamid Karzai is that he's a political genius who has absolutely no aptitude for government. All he knows is the politics of the kulan naffar. He'd be fine on the comfy chair of a Popolzai khanate, but what the world expects and what Afghans want and need is a democratic republic. Karzai was exactly what Afghanistan needed in 2004, but pretty well ever since, he's been exactly what Afghanistan has not needed. He's a wizard at deal-making and intrigue, but he can't even govern his own wardrobe. I mean, just look at his hat.

What a Koofi candidacy could do is give all the good lads in the running for 2014 a cause to crank back their testoterone just a bit and combine their many talents behind her. Abdullah, Ghani, Saleh and the others respect one another well enough, but they don't particularly trust one another. But they could trust Koofi. They know it. If they were smart, they'd also know that she could be the one way out, the big break everyone's been looking for.

It remains to be seen whether Koofi will stick with it or will choose to throw her immense moral and political weight behind another candidate. However things shake out, Fawzia Koofi should be expected to be intimately involved in whoever the leading contender for the Afghan presidency will be in 2014.

I highly recommend Fawzia's book, Letters to My Daughters, which will be in the bookstores in the coming weeks. I would recommend it even if she were not "the new face of Afghanistan," and even if she were not a political leader. It is an astonishing story, a pesonal memoir from the front lines of the greatest freedom struggle in human history. If you don't regard the emancipation of women in that way, and you don't know why Afghanistan is critical to that struggle, then you simply haven't been paying attention.

Whatever happens, you'll want to be paying attention to Fawzia Koofi.