Zeinab, 22, believed that only death could provide an escape from her husband’s merciless beatings. So she set herself on fire, leaving one-third of her body covered with oozing, blistering burns. She faces a lifetime of disfigurement and, unless she returns to her abusive husband, the likely loss of her two children.

Twelve-year-old Nazira’s classroom is a sweltering tent, and her desk is a plastic mat on the ground. But her teachers say she is one of their brightest pupils, encouraged by a mother and father who want her to get as much education as she can. Her eyes sparkle when she describes her ambition: to become a doctor.

Nearly eight years after the fall of the Taliban movement, Afghan women live on the cusp of triumph and tragedy. Life is immeasurably better than it was under Taliban rule, when they were forbidden to leave their homes without a male relative, beaten for infractions such as laughing aloud, deprived of schooling and employment, shrouded and faceless in public.

But dozens of girls and women, interviewed over several months in homes and mosques, in parks and in prison, in street markets and classrooms, described a nagging sense that the gains have not been all they had hoped for.

“It’s a kind of freedom, yes,” said a university student named Zarifa, who like some of the other women did not want her full name published. “We are like birds who have left the cage, but with our wings still clipped.”

The thwarted dreams of many Afghan women mirror a palpable sense of disillusionment in a country still battered and broken despite billions of dollars in international aid, and Afghanistan’s place at the center of the NATO’s biggest and most sustained military campaign.

... contd.