Hold the applause.

• Position: Comment - War on terrorism, United States

Though the war on terror is anything but over, the United States has declared victory over the Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan. The country has a new interim government. The Taliban has been chased from power. Many Al Qaeda members have been routed and captured.

"Collateral damage" has been kept to a minimum.

So goes the story from Washington.

We thought, at this juncture between Phase One of the War on Terrorism and Phase Two, which George W. Bush has warned us will be much more "dangerous," that it was an apt time for a humanitarian reckoning.

Here, as far as we have been able to measure, is the balance sheet.

On the plus side is the apparent gain made by Afghan women. The images of girls going to school and women showing their faces, walking the streets, gathering in a public stream to wash clothes, working, and joining in planning meetings for the new government have been some of the most heartening of recent months. (Other advances in personal freedoms have occured. Kids can fly kites again. The cinemas are reopening. People can own TVs.)

On November 20, hundreds of Afghan women--some of whom had expressed rebellion by wearing makeup and high heels under their burqas--took to the street and demanded their rights. It was the first such gathering in five years.

For advocates, the hope that Afghan women will soon receive the rights of full human beings is spilling into jubilation. "I think women are ecstatic," said Nasrine Gross, an Afghan American feminist, when she appeared on National Public Radio on November 24. "I think that they're very hopeful that very soon they will return back to normal with all their rights respected. They could become completely active members of society just the way they were before."

We are certainly hoping for that outcome, but two months after the demonstration, the future of women is still not clear, despite the presence of two women (out of thirty) members of the new Cabinet.

One vivid reminder of this uncertainty was pointed out by the Los Angeles Times on January 8. As the paper noted, many women who hate the burqa still wear it. "For those most damaged by five years of fanatic Taliban rule, the burqa remains a safe refuge from which to wait and see whether the outside world is truly changing."

One young woman told the paper, "I'll take it off when everyone else does.... No one has told us yet that it's permitted to go without it." The reporter concluded: "How much better women will fare...