To the beat of pop music, they celebrated.

Across Afghanistan, they are celebrating. The men are queuing at the barbers to have their Taliban regulation-length beards shaved off. Music, banned by the Taliban, is blaring out again, and trashy Indian pop tunes fill the streets.

But the women are still invisible. Despite the Northern Alliance forces sweeping the country, none of the women were tearing off their veils yesterday.

Dr Wahida sat in her home yesterday evening, her features half-lit by a flickering lamp. Her face was beautiful – but usually, no one outside her family and close women friends sees it. In the streets, she is one of the faceless shapes that come and go, shrouded in a white or blue burqa, peering out at the world from the tiny lace mask at the front.

In the bazaar, Abdul Baseer was selling cassettes. When the Taliban paid him a visit just over a year ago, they pulled the tape out of all his cassettes and hung it symbolically from the nearby trees. All he was allowed to sell were recitals of the Koran. Yesterday an old recording of Ahmad Zaheer, the great Afghan singer, echoed from Mr Baseer's stall. "Today I have drunk too much, let me dream my dream," he sang. "Put me in a river of wine." All of Afghanistan was dreaming with him.

But the women's dreams remain desperately limited. The jubilant crowd outside the stall were all men. The women hurried by in their burqas. Even in Northern Alliance territory, it is difficult so much as to speak to an Afghan woman – except beggars, refugees and the very old. Try talking to a woman on the street and you are liable to be attacked by her husband.

As Dr Wahida spoke yesterday her husband, Mohammed, sat beside her. At times, he did not allow her to speak, but answered the questions for her. When he let her answer, she her replies were brief and meek.

Despite the overthrow of the Taliban, Dr Wahida still lives her life confined in a tiny world: home, the hospital where she will soon return to work, and the street outside her house. If she goes into the next street, Mohammed says, he will punish her.

The Northern Alliance will do nothing to liberate Dr Wahida from this. Only a few months ago, in the Northern Alliance-controlled town of Rostok, a woman was beaten to death by her husband. He was not sent to prison, he was not even arrested. He received no punishment at all. He beat her because she quarrelled with his brother's wife.

But Dr Wahida said she was delighted the Northern Alliance had arrived. "Before the Taliban came, it was good for women in Afghanistan," she said. "Now women can work and go to school again."

Education and work were illegal for women. Dr Wahida was one of very few women who were allowed to continue to work, because she was a doctor. Even so, the Taliban only allowed Dr Wahida to treat women patients. After a short time, she left her job at the hospital. "Some of the Taliban used to make me come and treat their wives in the middle of the night, even after I had worked all day. I told them, 'I have four children at home, but they did not listen'."

In the bazaar, the young Afghan teachers at the United English Language Centre were excitedly talking of starting English lessons for girls again. Boys and girls used to sit side by side in the dirt-floored classrooms, on rickety wooden benches without desks. The school is private, but the Taliban banned girls from attending when they took Taloqan.

Women are not so repressed in all parts of Afghanistan, and in some of the more liberal cities like Kabul, the burqas will be flung away now that the Taliban have gone.

But, for millions of women in more traditional areas, life will not become much more free. They wore the burqa before the Taliban arrived.

In fact, Dr Wahida did not grow up with the burqa. She comes from the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, which was one of the most liberal places in Afghanistan until it was captured by the Taliban.

She was a star medical student. Now she is one of Mohammed's two wives, living in one half of a divided house with her children. The other wife lives in the second half with her children. Asked what she thought of the burqa, she smiled shyly. "It is our custom," was all she said.

Mohammed, his beard freshly trimmed, is not a tyrant. For an Afghan, he is quite liberal. "If we lived in Mazar, I would not make her wear the burqa," he said. "But if she did not wear it here, people would say she and I are immoral. I don't want to tell her she cannot go in this street or that street, but if she went anywhere she liked the men here would think she is immoral and take advantage of her.

"It is different in the West," he went on. "Your people are educated. Here, the men know nothing of women's rights. In a marriage, the man can do anything he likes. The woman can do nothing. In Afghanistan, we think of a woman only as something to sleep with."

Could Dr Wahida foresee a time when Afghan women will be able to live like women in the West? For once, Mohammed let her answer and she became animated. Her eyes flashed in the lamplight. "Yes, that would be good, to go where I like and not to wear the burqa. But what would be better is for the war to end in Afghanistan, for the fighting to stop, and there to be quiet here."