WHEN I FIRST met Illaha she was curled up on her bed, her bright eyes focused intently on the book she held close to her face. “It’s a novel,” she announced, flipping over the cover to show me the title, written in swirling calligraphic Dari as incomprehensible to me as to most of the friends around her. Growing up under the Taleban or simply in poor, illiterate families, few Afghan girls used to learn to read and write.

Illaha had done so because she was a refugee in Iran with no restrictions on her learning. She made it as far as college with the grudging support of her family. Suddenly, a year after the Taleban fell, her father decided that it was time for them to move back to Afghanistan. Illaha returned to her extended family in Kabul.

Ripped away from her studies, she found a job with an American construction company whose managers were so impressed with her talents that they began helping her to secure a scholarship to study in Canada. Alarmed, the family patriarchs began to circle.

“It was my uncle’s idea that I should marry my cousin,” Illaha explains. “But I refused because I didn’t want to get married, especially not to him. He was a butcher and not educated, and I wanted to continue my studies.”

Illaha was busy preparing for her move when her male relatives swooped on her and her sister, also betrothed against her will to a cousin. They tied the girls up, locked them in a room at her uncle’s house and beat them, demanding that they obey their elders. “They beat us and beat us until we bled,” she says. “We had no choice but to agree to marry our cousins.”

But Illaha was not yet defeated. Once released, she and her sister ran away, moving into a guesthouse in the Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul as they made plans to escape to Iran.

Before they could, the police arrived and arrested both of them. Illaha was taken to hospital for a virginity test so that doctors could examine her to see whether her hymen was intact. It was, so she was spared charges of adultery. But that did not save her from being sent to Kabul women’s prison for running away from home. She now awaits not a trial, but the day the authorities decide to release her. I met her there as she began her ninth month behind bars with no charges against her, just the vague murmur that she is there for her own good and safety. She still dreams of going to Canada to study, but bleakly recognises the reality of her life.

“Women have no power over their lives in Afghanistan,” she says wistfully, sitting on her bed next to a prisoner who was locked up for alleged adultery after she tried to divorce her abusive husband. “The culture here dictates that the men decide our fate.”

It is two years since President Bush said of Afghanistan in his State of the Nation address that “today women are free”. But saying it has not made it true. Yes, the Taleban are gone and little girls can once more skip to primary school, dressed in their baggy black shalwar kameez and white headscarves. But even in cosmopolitan Kabul, a third remain at home, forbidden by their families to leave in search of an education. In the countryside that figure doubles.

Fewer still make it to secondary school, often because of marriage, which 60 per cent of Afghan girls are forced into before they reach their 16th birthday, a tradition that goes back centuries. The fall of the Taleban has allowed women back into the workplace, but only 2 or 3 per cent of them can be found there. Wearing the burka is optional, but the vast majority of women — if they dare or are allowed to venture out of the home — still wear it, for protection against assault or because their families insist that they do.

Yesterday President Hamid Karzai was sworn in as Afghanistan’s first democratically elected leader. He pledged to use his five-year term to steer the country back on track after 25 years of war. Campaigners hope that in his drive to fight terrorism he will not forget the rights of women.

Earlier this month, Human Rights Watch wrote to President Karzai, reminding him of the plight of women.

The lack of security in the country is both a potent excuse and a reason to keep women locked up as prisoners in their homes. And girls such as Illaha, who have committed no crime, can still languish in jail for breaking society’s mores without breaking any law.