Kate Clark: As Kabul awakes from darkness, anxiety sets in

War on Terrorism: Witness

Last March, soon after I had been kicked out of Kabul by the Taliban, I met an old Afghan friend who was visiting Pakistan. He is an archaeologist, his speciality being the Afghan Buddhist era.

The Taliban had just destroyed the two giant Buddha statues in Bamiyan. His life was in danger; he had a chance to seek asylum in Canada but was hesitating. "You must go," I urged him. "It's too dangerous for you in Kabul. Don't worry, it won't be forever, you'll be back. The Taliban will be gone by the end of the year.''

He laughed with delight at the outrageousness of the idea. But that is what I thought in March. The Taliban's destruction of the Buddhas was a deeply symbolic act by a group that wanted to annihilate large chunks of the nation's history. There was opposition from all areas and ethnic groups. "Afghanistan can shake off the Taliban tomorrow," I said to my friend Joyenda.

The country has felt volatile, bubbling, ripe for change for months. I'm not convinced the military campaign was necessary, but in the end that's how the Taliban were defeated. I was just glad I was able to walk into Kabul ahead of the Alliance troops. The crowds on the outskirts were rapturous, smiling and laughing. They shook my hand and said zindabad! (meaning long life). A weight, a dreary totalitarian deadness, has been lifted off this city.

People keep saying, "I'm free, I can choose for myself – what haircut, what clothes, what entertainment." The Afghan generosity is reasserting itself. Kabul is refinding its identity after being buried alive for five years. "For today I'm happy," said one friend. "I don't care about the future."

But anxiety is setting in. The new masters of Kabul are just one group from the Northern Alliance. The ethnic Tajik faction, Jamiat-i Islami, their partners, are furious, saying the Alliance broke a promise not to enter the capital. One group is massing troops to the west.

The Taliban brought order. Any atrocities they committed were sanctioned from the top. Older forces are now in control, more chaotic but no less prone to atrocities.

America has chosen to unravel the political fabric of this country. They've defeated the Taliban, but that was the easy part. Knitting some sort of national consensus demands urgency and sophistication if it is still possible. People here fear a new round of inter-ethnic fighting. There is a bloody parallel from the mid-1990s.

I spent nine months in exile from Kabul, most of it in Pakistan, where life was much easier. But it felt like living in cotton-wool – comfortable, but blocking off my perceptions of Afghanistan. In the end the Taliban's strategy backfired. They could no longer threaten to arrest or beat my staff, or send intelligence agents to the house. Over the past two months, the world's attention has focused on Afghanistan, talking about Afghans but not to them. I felt even more strongly that my job was to get Afghan voices out to the world.

The day that I left Kabul, a friend urged me to take heart. Lines the friend quoted from an Urdu poet rang through my head as I walked back into the city. "Speak because your lips are free. Speak because you still have a tongue. See in the blacksmiths shop the flame is fierce. The iron is red hot. The mouth of every lock has started open. Only a few more days are we obliged to rest in the shadow of oppression."

The new rulers are cannier than the Taliban in getting their views broadcast. But I've had some angry encounters for daring to suggest a month ago that the Alliance might have split, or that its factions had shelled Kabul in the mid-1990s. I don't expect my work to be easy in the new era.

Kate Clark is a correspondent for the BBC