When I began writing about Afghanistan’s women, in 1996, the figure on their average life expectancy seemed so improbable I had to double check it. How could it be just 44? Today, it is 42.

So writes Ann Jones, in a compelling essay printed in the Nov. 9 issue of The Nation. Jones has spent years working with women in Afghanistan, and her bleak report should be read by anyone who thinks that the women might justify our continued military involvement there.

When the Taliban took power, following a civil war in the 1990s, they subjected women to extremely harsh restrictions, forbidding them to work or be educated. After 9/11, U.S. coalition forces routed the Taliban, and better times for women were prophesied.

But Jones reports that the better times essentially never arrived. Instead, we have a feel-good fiction going that, whatever else you may think of the war, at least we are helping the women.

A new constitution approved in 2004 seemed to give Afghan men and women equal rights. But the document explicitly states that it will always take a backseat to the Islamic religious principles known as Sharia law. Not surprisingly, when officials sit down to interpret the constitution, any objective notion of equality melts away.

The chief justice of Afghanistan’s Supreme Court once explained to Jones that men have a right to work and women have a right to obey their husbands. It is the kind of thing some jerk at a 1950s cocktail party might have said after a few highballs. Only in that case it would have been a joke, sort of.

Throughout our long engagement in Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai has given lip service to women’s rights. But indifference would be an improvement over his actual position. Apparently to corral votes from conservative Shiites, he hustled through a new family law that would have made the Taliban proud.

This was the law that, among other things, protects marital rape. It allows a husband to withhold food from a wife who refuses to have sex every four days. Men control women’s marriage choices and their freedom to leave the house. Rape outside of marriage is considered a crime against the father or husband, who are due restitution.

Last year, Jones reports, Karzai pardoned some politically connected men who had gang-raped a woman with a bayonet. He keeps his own wife, a doctor, at home.

It is true that several women hold seats in the Afghan parliament. But often they are afraid to speak out. Many simply do the bidding of their male backers. About the best they have been able to do for women is get the marriage age raised from 9 to 16. And even that may be a protection that exists largely on paper.

A dismal report from the United Nations last summer found that the war has made conditions worse for Afghan women. When not killed or injured in the crossfire, they are forced to flee, and locked up for protection. Activists are murdered; rape is common.

The more soldiers we field in Afghanistan, the stronger the Taliban insurgency is apt to grow, and the greater public support for it. The alternative is government by corrupt, brutal warlords whose views of women have proved scarcely better than the Taliban’s.

As Americans weigh the options, the models for what will happen seem to be either Vietnam, which emerged from the rubble with its own brand of capitalism, or post-surge Iraq, where our secret was to lure the insurgents to the other side, and where the end is still in question.

But neither model is apt to apply if women remain so thoroughly sidelined in Afghan society. And as Jones reluctantly concludes, the longer the conflict goes on, the longer Afghan women will remain brutally subjugated.

In the 1960s and ’70s, Afghan women were doctors, teachers and civil servants. Then the Soviets invaded. The disruption forced many young men into refugee camps, where, minus women and family, they became the radical men’s club of today.

The longer the fighting goes on, and the more the rebuilding of Afghan social structures is delayed, the longer women will suffer.

Deciding what to do about Afghanistan — and what realistically can be done — is for Americans a much larger debate. But it may be time to shed the illusion that this war is a feminist cause.

M.J. Andersen is a member of The Journal’s editorial board.