BBC World Service, my name is Lease to Set, and this is a wish for Afghanistan.

But I see happening in Afghanistan. It gives me so much pain. It's a really sharp pain.

I want to be able to have hope, but I think right now, and right now it's mostly pain.

Taliban rule returns. Rule by rule, especially for women.

Rules which are emerging are letting many women believe that the kind of lives they lived before.

The rights that they believe are theirs will be taken away from them, and so they are going out to the streets knowing that there could be violence, knowing that they have to do everything they can.

Everything stops. I cannot go to their academy. I cannot learn English. All of my dreams are ruined.

Teenage girls not allowed to go to school?

It's temporary, the Taliban say. They say they need time to organize things.

Although almost all Afghan high schools are already segregated.

It does strike me every day that what's happening, especially to women in Afghanistan, that if it was happening to women anywhere else in the world, it would have created more outrage.

That's gender apartheid. I don't know how else to explain that. When you're telling women not to show up to work, that's gender apartheid.

Is it because people really believe we don't deserve human rights? I mean, genuinely, do they believe that this is what Afghans deserve?

Shahab-e-Zad Akbar. She knows how education changes lives.

She's the first Afghan woman to do postgraduate studies at Oxford University in Britain, a student of Smith College in the US.

A schoolgirl whose studies were stopped the last time the Taliban were in power in the 90s, forcing her to become a refugee.

Now, like so many educated Afghans, she said to leave her country again, leaving behind so much of what defined Shahab-e-Zad Akbar.

Seeing everything destroyed and feeling like you're just an observer, people have taken over your life and they are undoing it, break by break in front of your eyes and you're just watching.

34 years old, human rights advocate, former government adviser, youth activist, born in war like most Afghans.

In a country under Soviet occupation, then a brutal civil war. But she was also born in a home full of ideas.

Her father, his smile was a prominent left wing intellectual, a free thinker, not always easy or safe in Afghanistan.

She was seen as being on the wrong side of the leftist movements. He was imprisoned during the communist regime in Afghanistan. So, he was always kind of the outsider.

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