For most of us the Internet is about emailing friends and sending a bunch of ecards. For Asma and her countrymen it's the only lifeline to the world outside. Their only means of telling us all that they too exist.

And then, sometime in July this year, the ruling Taleban banned Internet access within the country for both ordinary Afghans and foreigners.

In a statement issued on July 13, 2001, Mohammed Suhail Shaheen, a spokesman, claimed that, "(The move) was made out of concern that if there is no control over the obscene, immoral and illicit material over the Internet, it could have a negative impact on Afghans."

This sort of thing was anything but new for the country, of course. They had, in the past, been forced to give up listening to music or possessing pictures of people and animals. Men couldn't shave, women couldn't go out on picnics, the list was seemingly endless. And now, this.

It is not known how many surf the Internet in a country where over two decades of war has left the infrastructure in ruins. The impact of the ban has, however, been enormous.

Worst hit has been the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), a thriving human rights organisation dedicated to involving Afghan women in the fight for democracy. For them, the Internet is a tool with which to fight oppression.

Ayfara, Falloney, Shreengul, Wajjmah, the names do not matter. They are not allowed to talk or laugh in public, or walk in their balconies and courtyards. Wearing nail enamel can lead to their fingers being amputated, while not covering every inch of their body can lead to a whipping. For people like them, the World Wide Web takes on the roles of confidante, support group, and supporter.

The Annual Human Rights Watch Report, 2001 reiterates this: "Internet speech may seem low on the human rights agenda in a region where torture is commonplace and a computer is beyond the means of the average household. But the Internet is actually the most important in repressive countries, where people have no other means of sending and receiving information."

Since 1997, the RAWA site has been sharing the story of Afghanistan's crisis with a global audience; replete with grim images of public executions of women, a grinning man holding up the amputated arms of a thief, maimed and murdered children. These images have shocked and appalled all. They have, however, also informed and solicited aid.

Not surprisingly, then, RAWA was among the first to fall victim to the latest decree; yet another attempt to stifle the voice of a people for whom all other forms of media, including television, have already been banished. More worrying is the fact that the government is yet to make public how censorship will actually be practised, insulating its actions from scrutiny or evaluation under international human right standards.

But there still is hope. If the Taleban has force, it is still no match for technology. Foreign Minister Maulvi Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil knows this well enough, which explains his admission that it is futile to maintain an absolute ban, given the nature of the medium itself.

Firstly, Internet access is through Pakistani phone lines that cannot be controlled or censored by the Afghanistan government. Both private and corporate users are successfully circumventing the prohibition by logging on to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Pakistan or opposition-held Faisalabad. They have, till date, escaped the scrutiny of the religious police, which has warned of 'strict shariat punishments' towards offenders.

The most glaring example of such circumvention came when the Taleban government's site was hacked twice - once just hours after the ban. The hacker boasted about living in Afghanistan and defaced the site with obscenities against the Taleban and its allies. He also publicised the fact that while citizens are banned from access, government offices are exempt from the decree and have been using it for external publicity for years.

Dharb-I-Mumin, considered to be the mouthpiece of the militia, continues to enjoy a place online, along with other sites like that of the Afghan Islamic government, Afghanistan Network and Jamiat-E-Islami.

Human Rights Watch believes it is next to impossible for the Taleban to catch the hacker, explaining that, "The development of tools to protect against censorship and surveillance online, such as encryption, anonymous re-mailing, anti-censorship proxy server, and wireless communications make such bans ineffectual and violations are impossible to trace." Human Rights Watch Executive Director Hanny Megally cites the example of dissidents who use Anonymizer to gain clandestine access to banned sites and spread their reports outside the country.

Afghanistan is not the only country to suffer. Chinese authorities have shut down more than 2,000 cyber cafes in the past month and have established Internet police forces.

Reporters Sans Borders lists another 59 countries, from Turkmenistan to Zimbabwe that practise varying degrees of Internet censorship.

All this despite the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that, "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes the freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

Then again, human rights and Afghanistan? You can almost imagine Asma sitting quietly, smiling to herself as she reads this. God willing.