Out from the veil – a brave new face, the same old scars

In the traditional Afghan sport of buzkashi, a forerunner of polo, troops of horsemen compete to grab the headless carcass of a calf and gallop away with it. A match can go on for a week; it is not unknown for riders to be crippled or even killed during the struggle for the prize.

During the past two decades, and especially during the past two months, Afghanistan's 21 million people could not be blamed for feeling that their country has been the calf in a particularly brutal game of buzkashi. Between the Soviet invasion in 1979 and today, at least one million people have been killed in war. A quarter of the population has fled abroad, most to neighbouring Pakistan and Iran.

If life is miserable in the refugee camps, it is even worse for those left behind. Millions have been driven from their subsistence farms by a three-year drought. The country is top of the international league tables for illicit heroin cultivation, landmines, and infant mortality; bottom for literacy, particularly among women, and overall life expectancy. Above all, there is constant random violence, in which badly aimed American bombs are simply the latest chapter: Afghans have been living with collateral damage for years.

"Afghanistan's people are the toughest in the world," an aid worker told me in a refugee camp near Peshawar last month. "I knew things were really bad when I saw middle-aged men break down in tears after getting here with their families. In all my years of working with Afghans, I had never seen a man cry before, even when his leg had just been blown off by a mine."

Nobody under 30 in Afghanistan can remember a time when there was anything resembling peace, far less prosperity. The Taliban received a cautious welcome when its zealots swept across the country in the mid-1990s, because previously there had been anarchy, but the order it brought was that of the prison camp. The regime did nothing to restore the machinery of government or rebuild roads, schools and hospitals. Instead it was obsessed with the lengths of men's beards, and women who showed too much wrist or ankle from beneath their all-enveloping burqas.

Since the fall of Kabul, the inhabitants have indulged in all the activities banned by their former masters, from playing music to flying kites, and a few bolder women have ventured out without their burqas. But Leyla, a 19-year-old who ran a secret beauty salon until the Taliban militia confiscated her mirrors, make-up and precious hair-dryer, put her finger on the real problem.

She decided to start her business, she said, because she was bored. Her school closed when the Taliban banned education for women, "and I was just sitting in the house all day". Leyla has reopened the salon since the Northern Alliance took over the capital, but she knows she needs to go back to school. "I am 19," she said as she gave a customer a manicure, "but I have the education of a child."

Girls younger than Leyla have no education at all, unless they were taught in secret. As for boys, few have learnt much in recent years beyond the ability to recite Koranic verses by rote. The Alliance has called on female doctors, teachers and civil servants to return to their jobs, but most educated Afghans of both sexes left the country a long time ago. They are unlikely to return until they can see a clear future for Afghanistan.

That future is still clouded. The Alliance has swept across the country as fast as it collapsed five years ago, when the Taliban seized Kabul, but the northerners have reached the limits of their ethnic territory. The Taliban has retreated back to its southern heartland among the Pashtun, the country's largest ethnic group, whose tribal leaders are fighting to throw off its dominance.

Any Tajik, Uzbek or Hazara fighters of the Alliance who ventured into the south would be wiped out. They cannot help the US-led coalition to achieve its main aims: hunting down Osama bin Laden and rooting out his al-Qa'ida network. Indeed, the help that the US-led coalition has already given to the Pashtuns' rivals in the north has made Pashtun leaders reluctant to be seen as allies of the Americans.

And when you examine our friends in the north, it is not hard to understand Pashtun distaste. Thanks to the coalition's carpet-bombing, the Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum is back in charge of Mazar-i-Sharif. The one fact everybody knows about him is that he straps miscreants to the tracks of a tank, which is then driven around the parade ground until they have been mashed into the dust.

There are more favourable things to be said about him, such as his encouragement of female education and his willingness to work with Western aid agencies. But when the northerners last controlled Kabul, the Soviet-trained General Dostum, dissatisfied with his share of power, switched sides and helped to pound the capital to pieces.

The Hazaras also did their part in wrecking Kabul when they fought with the Tajiks. Shias from the Hindu Kush, the Hazaras claim descent from Genghis Khan's hordes. Traditionally the most downtrodden ethnic group in Afghanistan, they suffered Taliban massacres and saw their pride, the 1,500-year-old Buddhas of Bamiyan, blown up for being "idolatrous". But they too are now back in control of their home territory, and are renewing their rivalry with the Tajiks who have marched into Kabul. Hazara fighters are demanding entry to the city to "protect" their ethnic brethren, leading to shudders among residents who remember the last time.

In effect, the power vacuum in Kabul has been filled, not by the Northern Alliance, but by a single faction: the Jamiat Islami party of Burhanuddin Rabbani, still recognised as president of Afghanistan by the international community. His triumphal return yesterday is another example of the Alliance resisting international pressure – having promised not to go into Kabul, it has, and having promised not to form a government, Mr Rabbani's leading associates have taken over key ministries. Already they are claiming to have won the war by themselves, and are attempting to lay down terms for the future of Afghanistan.

Senior Jamiat figures have, for example, ruled out any inclusion in a future government of "moderate" Taliban elements, as proposed by an anxious Pakistan. They want any loya jirga (grand council) to construct an interim government to be held in Kabul, and are seeking to sideline the former king, Zahir Shah. He has been promoted as a figurehead to bring different ethnic groups together, though not as a future leader: he is a frail 87. Wisely, the former king is refusing to leave Rome, where he has lived since being deposed in 1973, until his role is clear.

The tensions rose several notches further yesterday when Alliance commanders, meeting in Kabul, objected to the presence of 100 British special forces at Bagram air base, 30 miles north of the capital, with more due to arrive at any moment. They had not been consulted, they said, and demanded that all but 15 of them withdraw. Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations envoy for Afghanistan, has publicly accused the Northern Alliance of obstructing efforts to arrange a meeting on the country's political future. Yesterday his representative, Francesc Vendrell, arrived at Bagram and set off for Kabul.

Having helped alliance warlords regain their former fiefdoms, the coalition owes Mr Brahimi, Mr Vendrell and the UN all the diplomatic support it can muster to get them into line. Men like Ismail Khan and Yunus Khalis, who have retaken their home cities of Herat and Jalalabad respectively, owe their prominence to their role in the US-backed mujahedin war against Soviet occupation in the 1980s. Having got the Russians out, the US and its allies turned their back on Afghanistan, leaving the country to another round of buzkashi between neighbours such as Pakistan, Iran, the former Soviet republics to the north and India. Pakistan appeared to have won that game when it helped to give birth to the Taliban, with results we are now suffering. To prevent another bout, the rest of the world will have to stay focused this time.

And as yesterday's row over Bagram demonstrates, that may require military muscle. With foreign forces beginning to arrive, Afghanistan is being divided, Kosovo-style, into zones: the French and other European forces in the north and north-west, the British in the east, the Canadians in the south-west, while US and British special forces continue the quest to stamp out the embers of the Taliban and al-Qa'ida in the south. Muslim troops from Turkey are heading for Kabul, with the aim of turning it into a multi-ethnic zone; soldiers from Bangladesh and Jordan are on their way.

Ostensibly these forces are there to secure routes for the aid desperately needed to prevent some seven million Afghans starving over the winter, but there is no question that they are also intended as an armed and visible reminder to the warlords that the world will not allow them a free rein. Things are difficult enough now, and could become tougher still if there is a bloodbath, either around the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar or in the northern city of Kunduz, where a strong force of Taliban diehards and foreign jihadis continue to hold out.

And when the Taliban is no more and the southern Pashtun finally find their voice, the coalition will need yet more resolve. For three centuries the Pashtun have been accustomed to ruling Afghanistan, but the last time all the country's ethnic groups worked together was to drive out the Russians more than a decade ago. Since then, it has been the Pashtun against the rest, with the rest back in Kabul and doing their best to keep their rivals out. That includes Zahir Shah, who is of course a Pashtun.

It is a strange, mistrustful time. In the northern city of Taloqan a hat-seller said that just before the city changed hands, Taliban fighters bought all his stock of the pakoul caps worn by the Tajiks of the Northern Alliance. That is how war is won and lost in Afghanistan, not in pitched battles. The locals have simply switched hats.

Imagine for a moment, however, that all the immediate obstacles can be overcome and that the international community can not only force the Afghans to co-operate, but stop neighbouring powers from interfering. What kind of Afghanistan will result? It will not be democratic in the Western sense: the country has never had a free election, and is unlikely to have one soon. For the time being it will be progress enough to persuade Afghans to settle disputes with words rather than arms.

As for the position of women, in the cities they will be able to leave off the burqa and go to work – if they can find any. For the foreseeable future, however, women in the remoter villages will remain veiled and illiterate, as they always have. It will take decades of aid and education, and possibly the presence of foreign peacekeepers, before Afghanistan becomes anything resembling a modern society.

This weekend Mullah Omar may remain defiant and Osama bin Laden still uncaught, his al- Qa'ida organisation bloodied but not yet completely broken. But it is not too soon to dream of an Afghanistan where peace will mean something more than the absence of war, where a man will be able to feed his family some other way than by picking up a gun.