Let's take a walk,” I suggested to Aziza. Kabul was in full bloom. The sun's rays had burnt the barren earth, but didn't reach us in the basement apartment in a grey, dilapidated neighbourhood in the outskirts of the city. My back was aching after weeks hunched on the floor listening to women talk of life behind four walls.

“A walk?” She looked at me in bewilderment. “A walk to where?”

“Just around here,” I tried.

Impossible. A walk without a purpose was a forbidden walk. She would just never get permission. The only reasons to leave the house were to run important errands or visit relatives.

Aziza belonged to a well-off and relatively liberal family. Yet the male head of the family would decide her whereabouts as he did with all the female members of his family.

Years have passed since our talk. Western politicians focus on improving conditions for women and children - and the conservative Afghan culture keeps hitting back. Schools are built to educate girls - and then torched to the ground. Aid programmes aimed at helping women are set up - and Afghan female activists are murdered and silenced. A constitution that proclaims equal rights for men and women is approved - and is then broken daily by the judgments of local shuras and jirgas, traditional assemblies of elders.

Aziza couldn't leave the house without permission, and she still can't. Now this “imprisonment” might just be a rule of custom, but it risks becoming part of the formal law of Afghanistan. A new, frighteningly strict family law that will apply to the Shia Hazara minority has been passed in parliament. A woman will, by law, not be permitted to leave the house without the permission of her husband and obedience to the man will be put into statute. The laws state that “the wife is bound to preen for her husband, as and when he desires” and that a man “has the right to have sexual intercourse with his wife every fourth night”.

So what will this law change? Not very much, simply because Afghanistan is not governed by the rule of law, but by that of men - fathers, uncles and husbands. Only one fifth of all cases are tried in formal courts, while 80 per cent are tested in jirgas and shuras where the “judges” often have no formal training. Instead the male elders who pass judgment base it on their personal opinions.

These judgments often violate Afghan state law and universal human rights. A defendant might get his house burnt down as punishment. Or he might have to pay his accuser, at times with money, at times with women. A girl from the family of the defendant can be given to the accuser's family to settle the dispute. Sales of girls can settle opium debts and the gang rape of young girls in full view of their families can be used as punishment outside the law.

Domestic violence has not been curbed. More than half of the marriages are with girls under 16 - and, according to a UN survey, this happens regularly with girls even down to six years of age. If a girl runs away from a violent husband, she is the one who is punished. Women's prisons are filled with those whose only crime was to flee from their husbands or because they have been accused of adultery.

It is not only a rule of men; it is also a rule of money. A judge's salary is about £40 a month and judges are either bribed, or threatened, to pass their judgments. Needless to say, the elder husband is more likely to receive the money than the runaway girl.

If people believed that the suppression of women disappeared with the Taleban, they will have to think again. The new rulers of President Karzai's Afghanistan are in many respects just as conservative as their predecessors. Attitudes do not change overnight, and the attitudes towards women are deep-rooted.

So what has been achieved since the fall of the Taleban in 2001? Have the thousands of troops sent by the international community - followed by many thousands more - been able to protect the most vulnerable?

Some women, those with education or jobs, are better off; but many others are worse off since the security situation has been worsening. Few studies on the conditions of women have been conducted in the vast southern part of the country, so little is known of the state of women in the former strongholds of the Taleban.

My friend Aziza's life continued. She was forced into marriage. The rules imposed by her father were exchanged for the rules imposed by her husband, and every year a new child arrived.

“Too early, too soon, too tired,” she tells me on the phone about the yearly pregnancies. Now, if she says “no” it might even be against the law. And leaving her new husband's house? Never without permission. The long path to women's liberation in Afghanistan is definitely no walk in the park.

Åsne Seierstad is author of The Bookseller of Kabul. Her latest book is The Angel of Grozny

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