The military alone cannot end the conflict in Afghanistan. On that much nearly everyone can agree, offering a rare island of consensus among sides otherwise divided on the question of how and when America's longest-ever war should wind down.

When the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996 after a searing, four-year civil war, they immediately instituted laws which fit their utopic vision of the time of Islam's founding more than 1,300 years earlier. Afghan women's lives offered the most visible sign of the imagined past to which Afghanistan's present was to be returned.

I think that sometimes people are frightened to take the risk of entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship isn't for everyone, and not everyone is going to be an entrepreneur, but women who turn to business, turn to economics, because there are people depending on them, I think that their creativity, their resilience, their spirit, embody what's best about entrepreneurship.