Dr. Qadir Assemy, a doctor in Herat, tells the BBC about the rebirth of his city. I found this paragraph about the Taliban's time in control there to be sad:
In my culture anyone called a "Taleb" is a deprived, poor man with nowhere to stay but a mosque. For us, talking about a Taleban who could lead a society or capture a city like Kandahar sounded unbelievable.
And then we came to realise that these people were not the Taleban in the way we always understood it. Overnight, we were told the Taleban were going to take Herat. Overnight, everything changed.
Schools were banned for girls, there was no media, no television, music, western clothes - I could not wear jeans anymore. We had to grow beards and my female classmates, teachers and lecturers were not there anymore.
I do not believe that Europeans have lived like this; to have an illiterate guy stop you at a checkpoint and hurt you for having a tape in your vehicle or asking why your beard is not appropriately long is awful.