With Iraq exploding in fresh violence every day, the Bush administration likes to cite Afghanistan as a model of what is possible. Laura Bush made a secret visit to the country on March 30 to meet with 800 women in a dormitory built with U.S. aid at Kabul University, where they are living while they train to be teachers. When she returned, she appeared on the Jay Leno show to say how encouraged she was about the progress Afghan women had made since American bombs toppled the repressive Taliban regime. "I didn't see any women in burqas," she said.

That's because her handlers didn't let her see any women in full cover. It would have ruined the story. "Eighty percent of the women in the markets wear burqas," says Pam Constable, deputy foreign editor of The Washington Post. Even so, the First Lady is right that women have come quite far since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001. When you consider that women in large parts of the country are still confined to their homes and not allowed after they turn 12 to see any man who is not a relative, getting them to vote in last fall's election was quite an accomplishment, says Constable.

She covered that election and tells of stopping at a gas station in a rural area that was doubling as a polling place. Lots of men bustled about. "Where are the women?" she asked. She was led to a farmhouse where all the women in the village were gathered and the lone literate woman among them, a 17-year-old, laboriously wrote out their names on ballots that were then collected. None dared appear at the gas station. "If a male truck driver saw one, it would shame us forever," a village elder told Constable. Yet a woman ran for president in Afghanistan, and she is now the minister for women's affairs.

Laura Bush says American women "stand in solidarity" with their Afghan sisters, yet there are limits to women's liberation in a tribal culture. Deep-seated attitudes and stereotypes, many shared by the women themselves, perpetuate what we in a Western democracy consider unspeakable treatment of women. The Washington Post just last week ran a front-page story about a woman who was stoned to death in Afghanistan for the crime of having committed adultery with a neighbor. Her mother supported the barbaric punishment and was quoted saying, "My daughter is a criminal. If she hadn't been killed, I could never hold my head up again in my community."

Constable was one of several female foreign correspondents and human-rights activists gathered in Boston at the Kennedy Library on Tuesday to honor the memory of Elizabeth Neuffer, a Boston Globe reporter who died in a car accident in Iraq two years ago. Neuffer believed in the power of journalism to draw attention to human-rights abuses and shame governments into doing what's right. Her 2001 book, "The Key to My Neighbor's House" (Picador), chronicles the ethnic cleansing in Rwanda and Bosnia and how the ordinary can become evil, and your neighbor your killer.

Constable recalled attending Neuffer's 46th birthday, her last, in Kabul. Afghanistan was back in the news this week, as protests over a NEWSWEEK report that U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo had desecrated the Qur'an left at least eight dead. But to most Americans, the war there seems a long time ago. Nonetheless, to the journalists who have been posted there over the last several years, it's an ongoing lesson in humility when confronted with a culture that is so different from our own.

"How do you interview with a straight face and a respectful attitude someone who tells you their daughter should be stoned because she had an affair?" says Constable. "It's very difficult … but you have to start where people are and not impose your own notion of what things could be." She wears loose baggy clothes and a head scarf. She no longer extends her hand in greeting because Muslim men recoil from the gesture, instead putting her hand over her heart, which is a way to show respect. "You're there to understand and chronicle what's happening. You don't want to offend people because that makes it harder."

With all the human despair around her, taking on the plight of animals in a war-torn country is not for the faint-hearted. While covering the war in Afghanistan, Constable founded a clinic and animal shelter in Kabul, the only facility providing veterinary services in a city where there are thousands of neglected and homeless street animals. Dogs and cats have no standing as pets in Afghan society. People feel no obligation to care for them, and they are left to forage through garbage.

"When soldiers would tell me they found this really cute puppy, I would stop them and say, 'then what?'" she says. Most animals were left behind, so Constable started a service to do the paperwork to document animals for soldiers and ship them home to the States. At a time when the media are under assault from the right and the left, Constable never loses her passion for making things better. Yet she remains objective and empathetic toward the culture and the people she is covering. Liberating women in Afghanistan is a lot harder than toppling the Taliban.