Paween Mushtakhel was 19 and nervous when she made her stage debut in Kabul. She fell in love with acting and went on to become one of Afghanistan’s leading theatre and television actresses, a specialist in comic roles. Today, at 41, she says she wishes that she had never discovered the stage.

In December her husband was murdered by unknown gunmen outside their home after defying months of telephone warnings to stop his wife appearing on television. “I killed my husband with my acting,” Mrs Mushtakhel says, her face dark with fatigue and stress. She has spent the past three months in hiding, fearful for her life and those of her two young children. Her only option, she says, is to flee the country.

She is not alone. There is an unease bordering on dread among many working women as the restrictions of the Taleban era begin to encroach again on the relative liberalism of Afghanistan’s cities. “The atmosphere has changed,” she said. “Day by day women can work less and less.”

In the past 18 months the Taleban has reestablished a significant presence in five of the six provinces clustered around Kabul – and people have begun to talk about an infiltration of the city; not necessarily of armed men, but of Taleban influence.

Mrs Mushtakhel reels off a list of high-risk professions for Afghan women: serving in parliament, working for foreign aid agencies, journalism, medicine, teaching, performing as an actress, singer or dancer. The Taleban justifies its attacks on such women by alleging that they are a cover for immoral acts and prostitution. Western employers and managers concur privately that women Afghan employees have begun to resign rather face the risks.

Zarghona, 22, who works for an international group in the city, told The Times: “My relatives disapprove of me working here. They say that there are boys in the offices and it is not good for my reputation. We are afraid a lot of the Taleban. I don’t feel good. I don’t tell anyone I work here, even my friends. I always wear a burka now to come and go to the office.”

The murder of Afghanistan’s most celebrated female police officer, Malalai Kakar, in September was a grim milestone. It was followed by a stream of killings of women journalists, teachers and workers, including four Western female aid workers in the past year. “Every time a woman is assassinated it sends a chill through the rest of their community,” said Theresa Delangis, of the United Nations Development Fund for Women.

Another dark episode was an attack on a girls’ school in Kandahar in November, when militants sprayed car battery acid in the faces of four women teachers and eleven schoolgirls.

For Mrs Mushtakhel the Kabul of today holds only echoes of the city that she grew up in. In the 1970s it was an island of relatively liberal sensibilities that now seem extraordinary. As a teenager she walked the streets with her head uncovered, wearing a short skirt.

“At that time the population of Kabul was small and educated,” she says. “Working in the theatre and cinema then were great jobs. We were proud to do it and the Government supported us. I loved acting and I laughed a lot.” The years of conflict that followed destroyed her family and the city they were familiar with. “The real Kabulis fled,” she said, “and uneducated people came to Kabul.”

Three of her brothers and her parents died during the conflict. During the Taleban period she was forced to stop acting but ran classes for women and girls in secret. When she returned to acting after 2001 she found that the profession was tainted by associations with immorality. “My husband supported my acting but when relatives came to the house he would change the channel of the TV so they wouldn’t see me. Girls from good families do not become actresses these days.”

Nawa Gul, her husband, stood by her even when rumours circulated after she acted in the first performance of Shakespeare in Afghanistan in 2005, a Dari-language adaptation of Love’s Labour’s Lost staged with British Council funding. “I was coming home after dark and people were saying, ‘Why is this? She must be a prostitute’.” She was forced to move house but refused to leave the production.

Last August she was again cast in a play, Sisters, directed by the French actress Corinne Jaber in Kabul. This time, menacing men – possibly Taleban militants – stood silently outside the theatre every night. Three months later her husband was murdered.

Now she moves every few days between the houses of a few friends who will let her stay. She acknowledges the irony that it is now the anonymity of a burka that is her best – indeed the only – protection that she feels on the streets of Kabul.

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