HERAT, Afghanistan—I came to this city of clean, tree-lined streets, near the Iranian border, to write about Afghan women. The subjugation of women under the Taliban, which forbade them to work, attend school or leave home without a male relative, once galvanized Americans’ emotions. The freeing of women was a big achievement of the Taliban’s ouster. But that issue is receiving little attention as the debate heats up over what our Afghan strategy should be.

So I traveled to Suraya Pakzad’s shelter for abused women in Herat as a reminder of the gains women have made, and the terrible price they will pay if the international community turns its back on Afghanistan.

Even today, cultural pressures compel most women in Herat to wear the tent-like blue burqa, with a mesh strip over the eyes, or an enveloping black-and-white-print chador that leaves the face free. Afghan women do work and attend school, although the Taliban is attacking girls’ schools in the south and east. The progress of Afghan women is real, but reversible.

So Pakzad, a dynamic, educated mother of six, has sought to solidify those gains—and to break new ground—as the executive director of the Voice of Women Organization. The group assists women in prison and works through community groups and religious leaders to convince men that violence against women violates the precepts of the Quran.

Nothing better illustrates the gains women have made since the Taliban fell, however, than the shelter Pakzad runs for abused women, which opened in 2006. “These girls would have been on the street [as prostitutes] or been killed,” she says. Other options were equally dreadful: “They could keep silent and suffer, or commit suicide, probably by self-immolation, or wind up in jail.”

The shelter sits in a large, rented, two-story stone house within a walled compound with guards at the gate. The women and girls live three to a room and have access to doctors, lawyers and social workers.

One typical story: 18-year-old Mariam was an Afghan refugee in Iran. Her heroin-addicted father forced her to sell drugs until she and her sister were arrested, deported and sent to an Afghan orphanage. They worked and lived alone until her father found them and made false accusations to the police that led to the jailing of her sister. The shelter will keep Mariam until her sister leaves prison, then will help them start their lives again.

Another story: Sad-eyed, lovely 15-year-old Nasima is an orphan who was forced by officials to marry a fellow orphan and found the relationship intolerable. She ran away, then was jailed for six months. The shelter took her in and will provide legal aid for a divorce. Next, it will try to find a way for her to finish her education and remarry.

Pakzad and her staff pay a price for their work: There are telephone threats, along with slurs against them for their perceived violations of cultural norms. But I have seen how Pakzad’s work is changing those norms. I watched her give a speech in a local mosque—unheard of for a woman—on her work to ensure delivery of clean water for poor women and children. She was awarded the U. S. State Department’s International Women of Courage Award in 2008.

When I ask what policy she hopes President Obama will follow, she is firm: Any increase in foreign troops must be accompanied by an increase in economic development. She hopes women will be a central focus of U. S. economic policy, with a fund for women’s empowerment that directs money specifically to the Afghan Ministry of Women’s Affairs, which is woefully underfunded.

Most of all, Pakzad hopes Americans won’t forget the women of Afghanistan. “The United States came to rescue Afghan women from a terrible situation, but the situation hasn’t been changed as much as we expected. If they left now, with no guarantee of women’s rights, the situation would go back to that of the Taliban years.”

—The Philadelphia Inquirer