Special report on second anniversary of the ousting of the Taliban

Karimeh Malekzadeh used to sew quilts to support her family during the six years of hard-line Taliban rule. Today she observes the situation of her country through the lens of her digital camera, two years after the fall of the regime. Each day, she roams the streets of the Afghan capital, Kabul, alone and takes photographs without fears or worries from the Taliban, who had banned women from leaving their homes and classified photography as "haram" (a sin or forbidden). The Taliban fled Kabul in the face of the US-led bombardment, abandoning it to the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance on 13 November 2001. "Life's vision and mission have hugely changed. During the Taliban era, I sewed quilts in an effort to survive, but now I have chosen to be a photojournalist aiming to change what used to be the disastrous destiny of my ruined country," Karimeh, now a reporter for the state-run daily, The Kabul Times, told IRIN. Karimeh had not believed it would be possible to shift from physical work to a professional skill. "It was more than a dream and completely unbelievable," said the 35-year-old, who had learned photojournalism skills from AINA, a French media NGO in Kabul, over the past 10 months. But despite the great changes in Karimeh’s life over the last two years, she remains worried about the second post-Taliban winter, living in her bombed-out building and the chilling cold of Kabul. "The ceilings of our rooms were wrecked when [in 2001] the Americans bombed the city, and we have not been able to repair them. We had a terrible winter last year with showers of water inside and outside our rooms and now we are expecting the same in the next few weeks," she said. "However, I am optimistic, but not sure if I can survive on my 1,700 afghani [less than US $40] monthly salary as a photographer," she added, noting that her income was too small in the face of rising food prices. OPTIMISM IN SPITE OF HARDSHIP As Afghans celebrate the second anniversary of the fall of the Taliban, many, like Karimeh, are very optimistic, even though they complain that their lives have not changed.

Over the past two years, millions of children, many of them girls, have returned to school

"It is good to be back in our homeland, but our situation resembles that of our first years as refugees - no job, no home, no knowledge of what might happen next and to whom to complain to," Mohammad Eqbal, a returnee who had returned home from Quetta in Pakistan last year, told IRIN. He said he was happy that the Taliban had gone and that he had been able to re-open his music cassette shop, "but with empty hands I can do nothing", he added. However, it is the issue of insecurity - critical to the country's future reconstruction and stability - that remains the biggest challenge ahead. And security, Afghans said, had deteriorated since last year. "The major change is that we [women] used to be threatened and beaten with whips under the Taliban, but now the whips have become Kalashnikovs [AK-47 assault rifles]," Nurkhanom, an Afghan medical doctor who had been a home-based instructor in mother and child health care both during and after the Taliban, told IRIN in Kabul. In many ways, she believed that the existence of irresponsible gunmen was even more dangerous and threatening than the oppressive policy of the Taliban. "All these so-called positive changes are unsustainable unless we have security on the ground," she said, adding that she had noticed an increase in the number of gunmen in Kabul and the provinces. "Disarmament is more important than anything else and should have been started right from the very beginning," she stressed. The mother and child health care coordinator for the French NGO, Terre des Hommes, said the only change so far was that people could be optimistic about the presence of hope, "which did not exist in the past". WOMEN'S PROBLEMS EVEN WORSE NOW "Maternal mortality, mental health and depression, as well as domestic violence against women, were the most serious problems of women during the Taliban, but these have all increased now," Nurkhanom highlighted, adding that she did not blame the government as it had to deal with the aftermath of two and half decades of devastating war and did not have the time to address all the problems at once.

Healthcare throughout Afghanistan remains poor

"In the whole of Afghanistan, we have only one obstetric hospital, despite the shockingly rising number of maternal deaths, nor is there a single equipped and functioning mental hospital," she said. She also believes that the six years of hard-line Taliban's rule had adversely affected the attitude of Afghan men towards women. "The six years of Taliban extremist and conservative policy has affected our men’s way of thinking negatively," she said, noting that she even knew of literate men who had refused to allow their women to work outside their homes or continue their education. INSECURITY NATIONWIDE The second post-Taliban year witnessed rising incidences of insecurity and fierce fighting in different parts of the country. Sixty-one people were killed and dozens wounded in outbreaks of violence across Afghanistan in the middle of August, in what Afghan officials have described as the year's bloodiest 24 hours. Meanwhile, frequent attacks on aid agencies, mainly over the past six months, have raised the humanitarian community’s concerns. "People see that their lives did not change in terms of security, and perhaps it got worse," Paul Barker, the CARE International country director, told IRIN in Kabul. He said the first post-Taliban year had been better than the second. "I think, looking back, we can see that in the first year after the Taliban, we had relative peace in Afghanistan. Security was good. There were a lot of problems, and there was a lot of hope. People were looking forward and had confidence that they were breaking the horrific cycle Afghanistan had endured for two and half decades," he explained. Barker stressed that the country needed a coherent security strategy to be adopted by the Afghan government and the international community, particularly as the country faced major challenges ahead, these being the constitutional Loya Jirga (grand council) and the general elections next June. "In order to have open and fair elections, there needs to be a high level of security in Afghanistan, especially inasmuch as during the last six months it [security] has been problematic," he said, noting that security had been better under the Taliban than it was now.

Disarmament - the next big challenge

"One thing that all Afghans have good memory of is that the Taliban had good security," he added. CARE believes that the challenges ahead are vast, and more serious international support is required. "We need more sustained long-term involvement of donors here than in usual postwar reconstruction scenarios," Barker said. Tajvar Kakar, a former deputy minister of women’s affairs, now headmistress of the Omid (Hope) Primary School, told IRIN that people had high hopes, having seen the strong international support for President Hamid Karzai. "Unfortunately, the two most pressing problems that Afghans have been suffering from over the last two years is that the existence of gunmen and insecurity is gaining ground," she declared. Kakar, who was a delegate to the emergency Loya Jirga in mid-2002, said this year's Loya Jirga would be more challenging and risky than last year's, as the rule of the gun still existed. "My family was threatened with death after I talked openly in last year’s Loya Jirga, and as the threat is even greater now than before, I will not be a candidate myself for the coming constitutional Loya Jirga," said Kakar, who had been the only Afghan women working in her school during the Taliban era. Kakar said her country’s most significant achievement was the return of over 3 million children to school. "That figure is a significant achievement, but millions are still deprived of education because of insecurity," she noted. Continued