'I Would Never Swap My Country for All the World'

No one could say that Dr Roshanak Wardak has an easy life. The 46-year-old MP commutes for two hours a day from her home in Sayyatabad, 55 miles south of Kabul, to the new parliament buildings to the west of the Afghan capital.

Sometimes the road is too risky even for her to drive. Given its proximity to Kabul that is a fairly good indication of how far security has deteriorated in the east of Afghanistan in recent months. To the south of Sayyatabad the road continues on another 200 miles to Kandahar. Under the Taliban, I regularly drove down it - all 18 hours of bone-jarring discomfort - in local taxis.

Even in 2006, this time in a fast 4WD, it was tense but feasible. Now, pitted by craters left by radio-controlled bombs, littered with burnt-out trucks and the debris of the low-level war that is spreading day by day towards the capital, the $300m flagship road project, completed on the express orders of George Bush himself, is a sad reminder of what has been lost in recent years.

Wardak is one of the few MPs representing the near 1 million inhabitants of her province – the name of which she shares - to still live at home. The rest have fled to the relative security of the capital. She says she is still safe there, despite the fact that the militants consider her a "collaborator" with Hamid Karzai's government. The local community are her protectors.

"I am a medical doctor and I am their representative and I am a woman so they look after me. As for the Taliban, they have respect for women and for my family because it is a famous family," she says, interviewed in an office in the echoing parliament offices on a sweltering afternoon in Kabul.

One of her drivers is "active Taliban", Wardak says. It is clear that he, as much as her good works, guarantees her safety when the insurgents stop the traffic, haul out those who have government identity cards or even government phone numbers on their mobiles and shoot them. Such are the myriad compromises that life in Afghanistan entails for tens of millions of people.

Wardak, a qualified gynaecologist who spent many years working with Afghan women refugees in Pakistan and who refused to wear a the all-covering burqa when living in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, is not averse to asking difficult questions herself. She says she questioned one Taliban commander about why he and his fellow militants "were destroying her country".

The answer was that 40 countries – all Christian, the Jewish – had attacked them. "This is what they believe," Wardak said. "I told him he was wrong."

She asks the Guardian to find out from the British Embassy why they never issues visas to the UK. "Do they think I won't come home? I don't want to stay in Britain," she says, suddenly angry. "I would never swap my country for all the world."

The lack of faith in Europe bothers her, she says. People need religion. When in Germany, Wardak was shocked by the prostitutes by the side of the road and pornography on satellite television channels. "This is wrong. This is treating human beings as animals. This would not happen if religious principles were followed," she said. "You need strong religion to have real morality. Otherwise your society falls apart."

And Wardak, whose uncle and grandfather were both MPs in earlier, more peaceful times, has challenging views about life under the last Taliban government. "As a doctor, as a woman, as an Afghan, the last regime was not bad," she says. "They were well-disciplined people. In their time there was security. At midnight, at 2am, I could go to my hospital when I was on call for an urgent operation and come back without any bodyguards. This is a major difference and I will never deny it."

As a woman, however, Wardak says, she could never accept the Taliban's restrictions on girls' education. And worse, the new Taliban are very different. "They are criminals. They are thieves and they are not acceptable."

Wardak is unmarried – which itself takes a fair strength of character in a country where arranged marriages are the norm and polygamy far from rare.

Afghanistan' renascent democracy depends on people like Wardak. An MP now for two-and-a-half years, she lives in a complex world of political and tribal alliances, dealing with shades of grey, not the black and white of western policymakers. She is feisty, hardworking, competent and articulate and there are too few like her.

It is midday on Monday and occasional footsteps echo along the corridors of the parliament buildings. The assembly's 351 deputies and senators have had difficulty establishing a real role in a nation where the overwhelming military power is foreign, where the government's budget depends largely on overseas donors, where drugs money comprises a third of the national economy and where the president prefers to ignore a them. The fact that dozens of MPs are linked to an astonishing range of serious criminal offenses does not help either.

Though the 2005 elections were enthusiastically welcomed with high turnout across the country – and lower levels of violence – subsequent years of sterile debate or being over-ruled by other interests means that the credibility of the new parliament is weak.

One lengthy recent debate for example centered on which word should be used for "university", an argument pitting Pashtu speakers, mainly from the south and east against Dari-speaking Tajiks from the north and west. The next major test of the new Afghan state's democratic structure will be the presidential elections next year, but with a third of the country currently gripped by a serious insurgency, there are fears that the poll may have to be postponed, a scenario diplomats in Kabul qualify as a "disaster".Roshanak is worried about more prosaic issues – basic development for her dirt-poor voters. She says that she is optimistic for the future "but it needs much work". We agree to meet in Sayyatabad, her home town, in a few days time. But half way there from Kabul, she calls to tell us to turn back. There has been a Taliban attack on a provincial governor's convoy a mile or so from where we are. "It is very tense," she says. "These are difficult days. Come another time."