Long wait for liberation
When the US and Britain ousted the Taliban from Afghanistan, they said that the plight of women was a top priority. Five years on, Natasha Walter visits Kabul - and is shocked by what she discovers

Five years ago, when the US and the British arrived in Afghanistan, they sold their mission to us not simply as a way of driving out the terrorist-shielding Taliban, but also as a way of empowering women. As Cherie Blair said in November 2001: "We need to help Afghan women free their spirit and give them their voice back, so they can create the better Afghanistan we all want to see."

I went to Afghanistan soon after the Taliban had been ousted from Kabul, and found that their departure was genuinely allowing women to hope again - even in places where you might have thought all hope would have died. I remember interviewing women in the very first post-Taliban Loya jirga (grand assembly), who said: "The doors of everything have been closed to women for so long. Now we hope the doors are swinging open."

One of the places that stuck most clearly in my mind was a dirt-poor village called Sar Asia, on the outskirts of Kabul. There I met women unable to leave their houses for education during the Taliban regime who had just set up a literacy course with the help of Rawa, the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan. When I asked the students, who ranged from 13-year-old girls to 50-year-old widows, if they thought all women in Afghanistan wanted more freedom and equality, my translator struggled to keep up with the clamour: "Of course we do," said one widow furiously. "But our husbands and brothers and fathers don't want it. The mullahs keep saying freedom is not good for us."

Recently I was able to revisit the country, and one of the first things I did was to go back to Sar Asia. The teacher invited me into the room that once had been crowded with women learning to read. This time the room is empty, its net curtains closed against the sun. "We're not teaching here any more," the teacher (I'll call her Alya, because she has asked me not to use her real name now) tells me sadly.

" They were threatening us, telling us not to do it any more, and we were scared...Neighbours may work for the government in the morning but at night they are the same Taliban with the same thoughts." She adds: "I think in the West you think that now conditions are good here, that everyone can go to school or go to work for the government. But now we are just watching things get worse."

Alya, who lost her husband and one of her sons during the fighting in Kabul in the 90s, tells me that less than half of the girls in the village go to school now. She has managed to find work as a teacher in a government school in Kabul, but hopes that the men in her village don't know that this is what she does. "We have heard that if somebody kills a male teacher he will get 20,000 Afghanis, but if someone kills a female teacher he will get 50,000 Afghanis," she says.

You can't say that things haven't improved at all in Afghanistan since the Taliban were "removed", and even Alya wouldn't quite go that far. During my time in the city I seek out evidence of change, and I certainly find it. I meet women in the government, including in the ministry of public health, where they are trying to deliver a package of basic healthcare for women. I meet women in non-governmental organisations working on literacy and advocacy projects, women professors and students in the university, and women in the media. But each of them has a negative to set beside the positive.

Farzana Samimi, for instance, a television presenter who anchors a weekly programme on women's issues, is the target of constant threats. "It's not for me I'm scared, but for my children - if anything happened to them," she tells me. "The situation here has not changed as much as we wanted it to change, and in the last year I have become more afraid. I would like to broadcast political programmes, but I cannot because of the insecurity. It would be too dangerous."

The situation in Kabul, however - which has a tradition of women's education and employment - is inevitably far better than in the rest of the country. Human Rights Watch says that a third of districts in Afghanistan are now without girls' schools, due to attacks on teachers and students by the Taliban and other anti-government elements; and traditional practices such as child marriage and baad, in which women are exchanged like objects in tribal disputes, still continue unchallenged. "Every day women are sacrificed for their family or tribe," Nilab Mobarez, a 45-year-old doctor who stood recently as a vice-presidential candidate, tells me angrily. "We still do not have the judicial system to resolve this." Women who stand up against oppressive traditions are vulnerable; the number of assassinations and threats against women working for the government and international organisations is rising.

Malalai Joya is, at 28 years old, the youngest and most famous of all the women in the Afghan parliament. In a way her very presence in the parliament is a powerful symbol of change; a woman who had to work in secret in underground schools in Herat during the Taliban time is now able to speak out against her enemies in the parliament. She rose to fame at the end of 2003, when she made a speech attacking the warlords who still hold the balance of power in Afghanistan.

Since her historic speech, Joya has survived assassination attempts and constant denunciations. Even meeting Joya is difficult; the night before I leave, her sister calls to ask me to drive to the front of the parliament building, where she sends a car to meet my car, and we travel through the darkness of Kabul's night streets in looping circles, to arrive eventually at a house where men with guns wave us quickly inside. The house feels cold and unlived in.

" I have to keep changing my house. I hate guns, but I have to have men with guns guarding me all the time. One day they will kill me. They kill women who struggle against them."

Although Joya hated wearing the burka during the Taliban years, she is still not able to take it off. When she isn't speaking she looks calm and poised, but when she speaks she is on fire, raging about the situation for herself and her country.

"Here there is no democracy, no security, no women's rights," she says. "When I speak in parliament they threaten me. In May they beat me by throwing bottles of water at me and they shouted, 'Take her and rape her.' These men who are in power, never have they apologised for their crimes that they committed in the wars, and now, with the support of the US, they continue with their crimes in a different way. That is why there is no fundamental change in the situation of women."

Joya talks like this to me, furiously, for more than an hour, almost weeping as she catalogues the crimes against women that still keep them in a state of fear: from Safia Ama Jan, the leading women's rights campaigner assassinated in Kandahar, to Nadia Anjuman, a poet murdered in Herat; from Amina, a married woman who was stoned to death in Badakhshan, to Sanobar, an 11-year-old girl who was raped and exchanged for a dog in a reported dispute among warlords in Kunduz in northern Afghanistan.

She is desperate for people to take account of the silent women whose voices we never hear. "Afghan women are killing themselves now," she says, "there is no liberation for them." This is not just rhetoric: the Afghan Human Rights Commission recently began to document the numbers of Afghan women who are burning themselves to death because they cannot escape abuse in their families.

The principal of the women's police academy, Homera Dakik, a tall 25-year-old woman who wears an elegant leopard-print scarf over her khaki-coloured uniform, was forced into marriage 10 years ago with the head of the Taliban secret services. "My father said no, but they kidnapped me. I spent four years in his family's house. I experienced terrible mental torture." After the Taliban fell, her father managed to get her away and brought her home. "It is really my dream now," she says, sitting in her office, "that we should be able to tell the world how such criminal things have happened to the women of Afghanistan. Once I thought it was only me who had suffered like this, but now I know that the majority of women in this country have known situations like this."

She shows us round the academy, which is like a palace compared with the rest of Kabul - it has dormitories, kitchens, lecture theatre, even a kindergarten, all spanking new, clean and lovely, built with money from international donors. But it is empty. How many trainees can this place hold, I ask? 200. How many do they currently have? Four.

" Families will still not let their women join the academy," Homera says sadly. "They don't see it as honourable." Homera is not sure that things will get any better. "For three years after the fall of the Taliban I was happy. Personally, as long as I have blood in my body, I will fight for my rights. But now we have great fear in our hearts that things are not going in the right direction."

The empty academy is a powerful symbol of the fragility of Hamid Karzai's government. Although Karzai may speak in favour of women's rights, he does not have the reach and resources to deliver on his rhetoric. His alliances with warlords whose record is little better than the Taliban's and his inability to give any real power to the women in the government have made women leaders sceptical of his commitment to their rights. Alongside that scepticism goes women's disappointment about the promised rebuilding of the country. Five years ago Bush and Blair were quick with promises. But the consensus now is that those promises have not been matched by action.

Everywhere I go, from the offices of big international organisations such as Oxfam, to government ministries, to little Afghan organisations, I hear anger and frustration. Anger at promised money that never arrived, even from blue-chip donors such as the World Bank. Anger at unaccountable donors who set up projects, but decided to move on after six months, leaving workers penniless and floundering. Anger at US aid that was tied to using US contractors with little knowledge of the country, so that, say, a vital health clinic in Badakhshan was built in a region where it would only be accessible by helicopter during the winter. Anger at poor central planning and lack of transparency in the government.

These failures of development mean that people still do not have the clinics, schools, clean water and roads that they need to start rebuilding civil society after decades of war. Even in Kabul most areas are still desperately poor, with no functioning sewerage and just a few hours of electricity a night. But in one area of the city is an unexpected string of half a dozen brand-new wedding halls, each three or four storeys high. These have their own generators, and night after night, against the pitch black of the unpowered city, their neon lights blaze out as hundreds of Afghans turn up to dance and feast.

The men and women sit separately here, and at the wedding celebration that Dr Nilab Mobarez takes me to, I watch women in the kind of outfits that would not look out of place in an 80s nightclub - sequined and spangly, full-length and fabulous - dancing to a band that jazzes up traditional songs. Among the silver-painted pillars and electric chandeliers I talk to bright-eyed, confident women, from Dr Malika Popal, who works at the ministry of public health, and her daughter Kausar, a tall and ambitious 20-year-old currently studying at the university.

" My dreams are complicated," Kausar says. "I want to go and study in America. I know I don't want just to get married." But even here you cannot escape the other side of women's lives in Afghanistan.

At one table I meet Kochai, a serious woman more soberly dressed than the others in a long olive skirt and jacket. She has come to Kabul for the wedding from Kandahar, where she works as a policewoman in the airport. She was married into a traditional family, and was abused for years by her husband. It was when her daughter then got married and started being beaten too that she decided she had to get herself and her daughter away from these violent men.

" I had to defend myself and my daughter," she said. The women now live without their husbands. "It is very, very difficult. I am sick of being frightened. During the nights especially I am frightened."

Like all the other women I meet, Kochai is sure that despite all the insecurity and lack of progress, life would be far worse if western forces pulled out. "If the British and American soldiers left now, we wouldn't be able to leave our houses. We would lose all that we have."

Yet everyone knows that the Taliban are regrouping in and around Kandahar; Safia Ama Jan, the head of the department of women's affairs, was assassinated there recently, and Kochai says the actual number of kidnappings and assassinations is far higher than we hear about. "In one week six women were killed. They were ordinary women, working women, but the Taliban say they are spies of the government. They tell them, 'Don't work,' and if they do not listen, then they are kidnapped and killed far from the city."

She has two bodyguards who take her to work and back, but after work she has no bodyguards - so in a way they only make her more of a target. "The morale of women in Kandahar is getting worse every day," she says.

When I express my horror, Nilab Mobarez looks at me rather pityingly and says: "This is only one case among so many. So many Afghan women suffer like this."