Dr Roshanak Wardak is an unmarried female MP in the Afghan parliament. She tells Jason Burke about the challenges and compromises she faces in her work

Jason Burke in Kabul The Guardian

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.