KABUL, Afghanistan - Shahgol Shah was just 11 when she was married off by her family to a man she didn't choose. She never went to school and spent her life raising seven children.

Today, at age 50, Shahgol Shah still obeys mahram, the Afghan custom that forbids women to leave home without a male relative. In public, she wears a burka, the long cloak covering her entire body that is worn by some Muslims for modesty. "That's our tradition," says Shah, her face cloaked in a shawl.

Her 26-year-old daughter, Ghazalan Koofi, lives a life her mother could never have imagined. She leaves home unescorted every day, working at a government department and attending university classes at night. She speaks fluent English and has never worn a burka. She dresses stylishly but modestly, her wavy black hair peeking out from underneath a head scarf.

Koofi demands the respect of her male co-workers. She insisted on a seat at a recent tribal gathering dominated by white-bearded men in turbans, where women usually have no place. She treasures her "love marriage" with the husband she chose for herself, Shoaib Azizi, a police department employee who calls his wife "a very brave woman." He helps with housework and caring for their infant son, an act that some male friends consider weak and shameful.

Will Taliban Take Over Again?

Koofi came of age after the U.S.-led military invasion overthrew the repressive Taliban government in 2001. The U.S. went to war against the Taliban because it sheltered Osama Bin Laden, responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks against the United States. The Islamic fundamentalist Taliban did not allow women to attend school, forced them to wear the burka in public and forbade them from going outside their homes without a male relative.

But with U.S. combat troops leaving Afghanistan next year, Koofi and other Afghan women worry that the Taliban will take over and freedoms introduced since the fall of the Taliban will disappear.

"We are entering a very dangerous period for women," says Koofi. "I'm very worried that we will return to those terrible days when the only place for a woman was in the home, doing housework and serving the men."

Across Kabul, Shukriya Matin also belongs to the generation of women who have become adults in a world of new freedoms - and fear a future without them.

Matin was in grade school when her family moved to Pakistan in 1996 after she was twice beaten for not properly covering her hair in public. For six long years, she worked as a low-paid child carpet weaver in the neighboring country.

She returned to Kabul after the U.S.-led invasion and earned a high school degree. Now 28, she directs a health care program at a hospital. She feels a sense of dread about the future.

"Only God knows what will happen to women after 2014," she says in lightly accented English as her 3-year-old daughter plays on the floor.

"Fears And Anxiety"

The arc of Afghanistan's recent history can be traced through the three generations of Matin's family.

Her mother, Zahra Matin, 52, was engaged at 9 and married at 13, and never learned to read. "For myself," she says, "I'm still hoping to take literacy classes and finally become an educated woman." She dreams of her granddaughter attending college.

But Zahra Matin worries the Taliban, still strong in Afghanistan, will come back and destroy her dreams, and the dreams of her daughter.

"I don't want that life for my daughter," Matin said.

The gains Afghan women have made since 2001 are under threat. A human rights commissioner appointed by President Hamid Karzai wants to repeal a 2009 law prohibiting violence against women. That law has been largely ignored and poorly enforced. A recent United Nations report described "fears and anxiety" among Afghan women.

"Signs are everywhere that a rollback of women's rights has begun," warned Heather Barr, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch. The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission reported in January that violent crimes against women reached record levels last year, rising 24 percent over 2012.

Afghanistan is still a deeply traditional Islamic country where some village girls as young as 9 or 10 are forced to marry older men by their families. Some women and girls who flee arranged marriages are hunted down by their fathers and brothers, beaten and sometimes killed.

Death Threats Against Women

There are undisputed gains. Women now have the right to vote and some serve in parliament, the army and the national police force, and there are 150 female judges. Yet the percentage of women in the government workforce has decreased by 4 percent since 2004.

Under the Taliban government, the only education for girls was in home schools, which were illegal. Today, 3 million girls attend school, but that's still only 40 percent of all school-age girls.

To convince girls not to go to school, Taliban extremists still throw acid in the faces of schoolgirls and burn down girls' schools. In the last six months, four Afghan policewomen have been assassinated, and prominent female politicians are threatened or killed by extremists.

Last year, the head of women's affairs was killed by a car bomb. A few months later, her replacement was shot to death on her way to work.

"The situation for women is very fragile," says Fawzia Koofi, an outspoken member of parliament who taught at an underground home school for girls during the Taliban era. The lawmaker, who is Ghazalan Koofi's aunt, has been threatened with death by the Taliban, yet she intends to run for president in 2018.

At her home in Kabul, she says, "Our gains could easily be reversed, and we'd have to start from scratch for the simple right to work outside the home or go to school."