Prisoners in Their Homeland

ALMOST EXACTLY A YEAR AGO, THE LAST AMER-ican troops left Afghanistan and the Taliban regained full control of the country. Since then, Afghanistan has descended into worsening poverty, repression, particularly of women and girls, and international isolation, underscored by the killing last week of Al Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri by an American drone strike in Kabul.

Azra Jafari, an Afghan politician and human rights activist, who was the sole woman co-author of the country’s 2003 constitution and in 2008 became her nation’s first female mayor, has watched all this from exile in the U.S. with growing despair. “We were a working democracy for 20 years and during this 20 years we were hopeful,” she tells. “Now, we have