Prisoners in Their Homeland

Since returning to power, the Taliban have abolished the rights Afghan women had won over 20 years. The future looks even bleaker and advocates worry the world has forgotten

- JENNI FINK

ALMOST EXACTLY A YEAR AGO, THE LAST AMERican troops left Afghanistan and the Taliban regained full control of the country. Since then, Afghanistan has descended into worsening poverty, repression, particularly of women and girls, and international isolation, underscored by the killing last week of Al Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri by an American drone strike in Kabul.

Azra Jafari, an Afghan politician and human rights activist, who was the sole woman co-author of the country's 2003 constitution and in 2008 became her nation's first female mayor, has watched all this from exile in the U.S. with growing despair. "We were a working democracy for 20 years and during this 20 years we were hopeful," she tells Newsweek. "Now, we have nothing. What we worked on for 20 years is reduced to nothing."

Despite an initial public relations push to depict themselves as more moderate  than during the 1990s, since retaking power the Taliban have banned women and girls from schools and most workplaces outside their homes. Their dress, speech and movements are tightly restricted. In the worsening economic situation, some poor families have resorted to selling their young daughters into arranged marriages. Arbitrary arrests, disappearances, torture and killings of men and women are widespread. Without an organized pressure campaign from the United States and its allies, Jafari says, nothing will change. "In Afghanistan, I don't see any group that could control the Taliban," she says. "The Taliban will never change their ideologies and the international community needs to make a plan." So far, she says, there has been nothing substantial from the West, besides statements condemning the crackdown.

In January, António Guterres, United Nations secretary-general said, "For Afghans, daily life has become a frozen hell."