Everyone drawn into the orbit of Afghanistan, a starkly beautiful place forever steeped in tragedy, soon learns in some unforgettably personal way how insistently foreigners fight to shape its history. For me, it was the sound of breaking glass.

Competing television crews had crashed through the doors of a conference center in Islamabad in February 1989 in a rush to film a row of turbaned holy warriors announcing how the country would be run after Soviet troops had gone.

Only there was no announcement. A great shura - an Afghan council of clan leaders - had ended with nothing newsworthy to report. The turbaned figures shuffled off the stage, and went back to a war they knew was not over. We hacks all trooped out over the shards of the doors and the brokenhopes of getting a monumental story.

That evening, in the spartan hotel room of a delegation of Afghan exiles from Europe called home to join in the deliberations, Mohammad Sadiq, a man with a sad, exhausted face who had been in and out of Afghanistan for a decade, implored me to tell the West to be patient. "This is just the beginning of a long process," said Mr. Sadiq, a member of the Islamic Society, a fundamentalist organization. "We cannot solve the problems of 10 years of fighting in 10 days."

The Soviet Union was gone, he said, but it would take time to finish the job of cleansing the country of communism. He was right. It took three more years. By then no one was interested. The communist regime of Najibullah -- he added Mohammed to his single name toward the end as the holy warriors known as mujahedeen loomed large in his future -- fell almost as silently as the proverbial unheard tree in the forest. Najibullah himself was by then hiding in a United Nations compound, from which the Taliban would drag him four years later and hang him from a street light in Kabul.

But that gets ahead of the story. The mujahedeen - everyone called them The Muj, as if they were a rock group -- had bested what we now know was a crumbling Soviet army with equal parts of American arms and an astonishing courage and superhuman tolerance for the severest hardships. Another era of foreign meddling, a tradition that started with Alexander the Great, or maybe earlier, ended disastrously in 1989. Russian mothers came to Pakistan and begged the Afghans to turn over their missing sons. How many were still alive was an open question. In the bazaars of Islamabad and Peshawar, near the Afghan border, personal items stripped from the bodies and barracks of dead Russians were on sale - heartbreaking pictures of mothers, wives or children framed in silver, tiny Bibles in Cyrillic script, ornate samovars, fur hats, now-useless medals. Since the targeting of Afghanistan by the United States this year, we all know about the Great Game: how the 19th century British and Russian empires vied for influence there, and how the British paid for their efforts in two major massacres and countless other lives lost. Russian families were still paying the price a century later.

On the whole, the muj leaders, warlords over seven quarreling factions,were not nice people. Except for the media-savvy - most notably Ahmed Shah Massood, who was recently assassinated in northern Afghanistan - they despised and denigrated women. One of them, Abdul Rasul Sayaf, official spokesman for the shura, lectured journalists for an hour and a half about their "incorrect" reporting and ventured to suggest that women were not welcome as reporters. Michael Battye, a Reuters correspondent, took the opportunity of the huge news conference to put Sayaf in his place publicly by saying that if the muj wanted our attention, they would have to get used to doing things our way.

Another of their leaders, Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, had a reputation for throwing acid in the faces of women who went out in public with their heads uncovered. In Peshawar, an aid worker told me that in one of the squalid refugee camps controlled by a particularly conservative faction there was a prohibition against giving women soap, lest they use it to make their bodies enticing. Later, when this assortment of misogynists was in power in Kabul, they banned Afghan women from taking an official delegation to the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing.

Keep your eye on the ball: the dregs of this bunch, now styled the Northern Alliance, has American support - again - in toppling the Taliban.

In 1998, while a correspondent at the United Nations, I went to Afghanistan to get a glimpse of the country under Taliban rule, two years after they had driven the muj from the capital. The Taliban had been welcomed at first by Afghans. The occasion of our trip was a visit by Carol Bellamy, executive director of Unicef, the U.N. children's fund. I wanted to see life on the streets and to watch how Taliban officials would deal with a woman who had considerable power. They wanted money for education and other projects; she held the purse strings. Two other female journalists were with us, Pam O'Toole of the BBC and Kathy Gannon of the Associated Press, the agency's Islamabad bureau chief and undoubtedly the best Western reporter covering Afghanistan, almost full time, then and now. Let it never be said women can't handle Islamic societies.

In meetings with Afghan women, on visits to homes, hospitals and rural villages, I heard some things I wasn't expecting. There was medical care available to them; we visited the women's wards. Public violence had decreased as the Taliban confiscated the weapons that had made a free-firezone of Afghanistan under the muj. Corruption and extortion were down and, oddly, women were safer in many ways. Had the Taliban - largely a movement of young men from war-ravaged homes and primitive Islamic schools who had no experience with women, a humane civil society or government - not promulgated and enforced their medieval concepts of female behavior life may just have been tolerable, or barely so.

Of course food was short, Kabul was in ruins, breadwinners were dead and a drought soon followed. Added to the inability of the Taliban to govern or restart even a rudimentary economy, these conditions could only exacerbate most women's hardships as they struggled against confinement. Many begged in the streets, for lack of other alternatives. Zealots in pickup trucks flying white flags cruised around like delinquent teenagers, spreading terror. One of them rammed a car in which a European relief worker and I were riding. We were wearing Pakistani clothes and perhaps were mistaken for burqa-less Afghans. Or maybe it was just an opportunistic expression of contempt for foreigners. Fortunately, we were near a U.N. guest house, and an Afghan guard ran out and chased the virtue squad away.

Later, on a busy shopping street in the eastern city of Jalalabad, men stared at Pam and me with open contempt as we strolled along suitably dressed (and with Taliban escorts) trying to get a sense of life beyond Kabul, which the Taliban treated with the same revulsion that the Khmer Rouge had turned on Phnom Penh. For a fleeting moment, I allowed myself a foray into cultural relativism. What if men in almost any other city, almost any other country, had suddenly been told it was open season on women -- that it was OK to insult them, attack them, kill them if they were not properly dressed?

Our last day was spent in rural villages north of Jalalabad. There we saw home schools, the semi-clandestine education system for girls that Carol Bellamy was at first reluctant to support because it seemed to absolve the Taliban of responsibility for providing equal education. Women told her they disagreed. These hidden schools - dirt floors, scant books, no chairs or desks - were all they had. Unicef helps them now - or did before international agencies were driven out of Afghanistan in anticipation of an American war.

We drove to those villages through endless waves of opium poppies in full bloom. Two years later, the Taliban banned poppy cultivation and wiped out the whole crop in a year, hoping this would ingratiate them with a world they never understood. It didn't. Some months later, when children were dying of starvation and cold, a Unesco delegation arrived to ask the Taliban to protect the Bamiyan Buddhas. Not a word was said about a million Afghans on the verge of death. The Buddhas were destroyed, but not until -- the Taliban say -- Arabs and other foreigners based in the country were recruited to do the job. The local Taliban forces in Bamiyan apparently refused; they had lived with these statues all their lives.

Looking back may not be very productive at this point, but some of us old-timers now out of the picture and out of the region are often pained to see the simplistic template applied to Afghanistan under the Taliban when it became was necessary to condemn them along with Osama bin Laden, admittedly perhaps the worst of a crop of extremist Islamic demagogues. For a decade, bin Laden had been known as a pivotal player in a very dangerous if fragmented phenomenon, but no effort was made to capture him until after the bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

For half a decade, the United States prevented the Taliban from taking Afghanistan's United Nations seat, a sure way to keep them from learning anything from the community of nations. It was a slight Afghanistan's benighted rulers never understood. Other countries - Burma, Congo, Indonesia - sent new delegations when governments changed in coups. But guess who still holds Afghanistan's U.N. seat? The muj.