– The students wore black gowns, academic caps and unbridled smiles. “Pomp and Circumstance” wandered out of the sound system and across a seating area swollen with family members and friends. The spectators stood as the young scholars strode up the center aisle — a dividing line between past and future, a pathway to dreams.

Like spring, graduation season was in full flower. Even in a land of war.

I arrived in Kabul from Minneapolis in late May, three days before the American University of Afghanistan held its third commencement since opening in 2006. Less than 24 hours before the ceremony, six insurgents had launched an attack on a foreign aid agency nearby, killing four, another violent episode in the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan that began in 2001.

But watching the 129 members of AUAF’s class of 2013, I could imagine the scene taking place at Augsburg or Carleton or Macalester. The men and women walked across a dais when their names were called to grip-and-grin with the university president. Then, degree in hand, they waved to loved ones.

They were no longer students. They were graduates entering life’s next phase.

“People my age feel our country can have a new start,” said Tamana Nabizai, 22, who grew up in Herat, a western province bordering Iran.

In a nation where women’s rights languish, almost one-third of the school’s more than 1,700 students are women. Campus officials project that women will make up half the student body within a decade, when enrollment at the private, nonprofit school peaks at 5,000 to 6,000. “We have waited long enough,” she said. “We are ready to push Afghanistan ahead.”

For now, war continues to pull the country back. Students at American University and their counterparts at U.S. schools study in circumstances as different as First World and Third. I’d wager that those attending graduation at the University of Minnesota last month did not have their bags and purses glazed by the moist snout of a bomb-sniffing dog.

Yet, like students in Minnesota, AUAF’s graduates possess hope — in a country often scorned as a place of endless bloodshed.

“The people who graduated today want to change Afghanistan,” said Abdul Ghani Popal, 24, a native of the southern province of Kandahar, where the Taliban was born. He believes his cohort, better educated than previous generations, can transcend the nation’s age-old tribal rivalries. “There will always be different ideologies,” he said. “But my generation feels that we can make a new kind of Afghanistan.”

His confidence may invite jokes about the naiveté of the newly graduated, whether at AUAF or, say, Hamline. On the other hand, Sharif Fayez, AUAF’s founder and a former Afghan minister of education, faced similar skepticism in 2002 when he proposed creating the country’s first independent college.

“Some journalists have said I am an unbridled optimist. But if you want to get something done that is difficult, what else can you be?” he said. “This generation of students understands that the old ways won’t work.”

His perspective is shared by Ryan Crocker, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan who returned to Kabul to deliver the school’s commencement address. Convinced that young Afghan adults crave political reform, he dismisses as “a myth” the idea that Afghanistan will plunge into civil war after 2014, when the U.S. military ends combat operations here.

But Crocker, who retired last year after nearly four decades as a diplomat, added a caution. “We have to honor our commitments to Afghanistan so that other countries do the same,” he told me. “When the international community backs away from Afghanistan, bad things happen.”

Perhaps with that in mind, Crocker concluded his speech on a note at once upbeat and blunt. “Good luck, graduates, and enjoy the day,” he said. “Reality begins tomorrow. Be on time for it.”

Wise advice for anyone fresh out of college — in Kabul or Minneapolis — but freighted with greater urgency for those in a land of war.

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Martin Kuz, of Minneapolis, is a freelance journalist in Afghanistan.