If you are the mother of a soldier fighting in Afghanistan, who wakes up every day with a cold pit in your stomach, and listens to every news bulletin with a dry mouth, there are very few things you can console yourself with in this most dangerous of presidential election weeks.

In such circumstances, all parents rely on crumbs of received wisdom: the reassurance that their sons and daughters, in holding back terrorism, and restoring international stability and security, are doing something very noble. That there can be no greater cause than installing democracy, and in particular freeing women from the yoke of oppression.

Just days before the elections, however, we learn that the ideological battle for women is already compromised, sacrificed in the murky horse trading that President Karzai hopes will keep him in power within a deeply misogynist society.

Mr Karzai, the West’s indecisive placeman in Afghanistan, eager to please everyone, has quietly signed an amended version of what has become known as the “marital rape law”, to retain popularity with clerics and his male followers. While the clause insisting that a man has the right to sex with his wife a certain number of times a week may have been removed, the Shia Personal Status Law, described as “abhorrent” in its original form by President Obama, remains abhorrent. It allows a man to deny his wife food if she denies him conjugal sex, grants guardianship of children to fathers and grandfathers, lets rapists pay to avoid being prosecuted, and requires women to get permission from their husbands to work.

The result would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. The British Army, decent and professional and upstanding as ever, now finds itself fighting to within an inch of the polling stations in order to allow Afghan men to continue mildly unpleasant habits such as withholding food from their wives, insisting on sex and imprisoning them in their own home. (Which makes you wonder exactly what the problem with the Taleban was.) Cyncially, Mr Karzai knows that in his deeply conservative country voting remains a man’s game. Women have the right to vote — at strictly segregated women-only polling stations — but the turnout is likely to be poor. Only 38 per cent have registered for Thursday’s election and far fewer are expected to appear.

Poor security, illiteracy (85 per cent of women have no formal education), a reluctance to have their photographs taken for their voting cards and a shortage of female staff to run the female polling stations will keep many voters away from the ballot box. In more traditional Islamic areas, suspiciously high levels of female registration have been reported, as men use women’s cards for their own choices.

Mr Karzai is a Pashtun, one of the more conservative groupings in Afghanistan. Despite paying lip service to the West, the President apparently maintains his own double standards. His wife, Zinat Karzai, a medical doctor, is conspicuous by her absence. She has no voice, is rarely seen in public and is reported to have told an activist that she did not leave the house because her husband did not like it and did not give his permission.

This is not an issue that will be solved overnight by the imposition of ballot boxes. The Pashtuns have a dangerous code of honour that says that it is the absolute duty of men to protect the respectability of women and the integrity of their homeland; and the inviolability of both are closely related. This, reinforced by ignorance and suppression, translates as the age-old sentiment “Only I am allowed to hurt my women”. It keeps women in Afghanistan — and in Islam in general — trapped. Up to 80 per cent, the organisation Women for Women International found, are affected by domestic violence, and those brave enough to seek help are further molested by government representatives. Almost half of all girls are forced into marriage before 16, and some as young as 9.

In a survey, 47 per cent of Afghan women said that they needed their husbands’ or family’s permission to walk down the street. Significant numbers complained about their inability to go to school or work without permission (wages are one third of men’s). Even more shockingly, an Afghan woman’s average life expectancy is only 44 years. The maternal mortality rate is 1,600 to 1,900 deaths per 100,000 live births, meaning that one woman dies in childbirth every 29 minutes. In rural areas, the percentage of women who cannot access healthcare is as high as 90 per cent. Against this, the issue of whether or not a Muslim girl can bathe in a burkini in France suddenly seems rather minor.

So amid the corruption, we must be fiercely pragmatic. Although Mr Karzai has effectively betrayed half the population of his country by signing the personal status law, under his stewardship it is possible to say that things have improved a little for women, and can only, with stability and democracy, improve even further. It will be an achingly slow process — the horrific statistics tell you that — but it can only move in a better direction.

As Women for Women International put it, women’s wellbeing is the bellwether of society: how women fare correlates directly with how society fares overall. The only way a new Afghanistan is ever going to emerge is if their place in society undergoes a revolution.

And one can say that revolution is starting. Since 2001, women represent 27 per cent on the National Assembly. The Afghan Government has committed to fast tracking women in the civil service to 30 per cent by 2013. There is a female cabinet minister, an Afghan Women Judges Association, and two women are standing in the presidential elections.

Despite the increase in rape, and the violence, and the daily dismay of being second-class citizens, the vast majority of Afghan women believe that there has been an improvement in general life. In the face of their optimism, we have to stick with them.

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