Watching the horrifying footage coming out of Kabul today - desperate people clinging to the wheel compartments of the last few US military planes leaving Afghanistan - is heartbreaking to me.
I grew up under Taliban rule in the 1990s and remember the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach when I arrived at school only to find the doors barred.
At the age of 13, I and my friends, siblings and the women of my family were held hostage in our own homes, our freedoms and movements restricted to the point where we could only leave the house on rare occasions if we were accompanied by our male relatives.
For five long years I went without a formal education, snatching lessons here and there from the brave teachers who opened their own homes for secret schooling - until the Taliban found out and threatened them. My one avenue of learning was shut down, although luckily my parents insisted on us studying what we could at home.
Being a teenager under Taliban rule is extremely difficult. We were cut off from our friends and our social lives. Being imprisoned in your own home with limited opportunity to do anything is boring and gradually turns into various forms of depression.
Many of us had to pick some hobbies just to occupy our time. I discovered by accident that I liked painting - I hadn't in school, but I started doodling and sometimes I could spend seven, eight hours immersed in art. It was my only solace and the only time I could forget what was happening to my country and my city.
Many families who had raised their girls to gain an education, to follow their dreams and find a career, ended up marrying off their daughters in their early teens. Our mothers' generation was educated, they had university degrees and only got married in their mid to late 20s. But they were marrying off their girls at 13, because they were worried about the lack of security.
They lived in fear someone might spot their daughters and home and force them to marry a Taliban.
Our every move was dictated by the Department for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. That meant a strict dress code for women and girls - we were not permitted to show even a fraction of our face, or we'd risk a beating on the streets by cruel Taliban who were only too quick to resort to violence against us.
Some brave women in my home city of Herat refused to comply with the dress code. It was a form of resistance, of pushing back against the regime. If we wore clothes that didn't cover our faces, we were beaten up by the Taliban. They were infamous for mistreating people on the streets.
But when they saw so many women who were not following the regulations - and were accepting their beatings anyway - the next strategy they announced was that they would not beat the women but the male family members chaperoning them, as they were the ones now responsible for the actions of their women.
As a result, those who were trying to resist the Taliban faced a lose-lose situation. One cannot subject their family members to Taliban's brutality. And that was essentially a breaking point for a lot of women who could not let their family members encounter that experience.
We were not allowed to listen to music. We were not allowed to watch TV, even in hiding. If anybody was caught with VCRs the Taliban would beat them up, blacken their faces. They would pick up people who broke the rules and throw them in the back of their pickup trucks and drive them around the city.
The Taliban's brutality is endless. They says they've changed since the 1990s. They might have changed a little. However, having experienced Taliban's role in Afghanistan as a young girl, and having studied them as a scholar, I I have my doubts.
They've gained more legitimacy since the US announced it was withdrawing and throughout the so-called peace negotiation process. Now they have more funding, more money at their disposal. They're much, much stronger.
And in the manner that they took over the country, I can only assume they're going to get more funding and more money channelled towards them through regional countries to their former supporters. They will get their hands on the assets that have been left in the country by Nato forces.
This will embolden other organisations too. The TTP [Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan], the al Qaeda affiliates in Afghanistan, the ETIM [Turkistan Islamic Party, formerly known as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement]. You name it, this will embolden all of them.
Imran Khan, the prime minister of Pakistan, has already praised the Taliban's victory saying that they're there to free the minds, to free Afghans, liberate them. This is the same Mr Khan who called Osama bin Laden a martyr. So the Taliban does have its regional support. But its support from the very ones who also support terrorism, who support chaos, who also support some sort of authoritarian regime where many values that Afghanistan cherished for the past 20 years, such as freedom of speech, do not exist and do not mean anything to them.
Almost overnight we've lost the very dynamic free media and civil society that was so active in the past 20 years. That no longer exists. It's all gone. All lost.
Luckily for me, my family migrated to Pakistan in 1998. I finished high school there and got a scholarship to do my undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto. It was a dream come true for me, and I went on to do my master's degree and get a PhD. It was my way of resisting the Taliban.
I realised that because they deprived me of an education at an early age, I just wanted to continue to the very last stretch of it.
Some of my friends and family who are still in Afghanistan have gone into hiding. They are in fear for their lives. We have cousins who worked for the security forces and they are in a very desperate situation. They've heard the Taliban have started making lists of names and they're going from house to house searching for individuals.
To think that just this morning, students will have woken up and faced closed doors at their schools and universities, and the disappointment thousands of them will be feeling now. It's a feeling of utter hopelessness.
This is the end for a lot of them. The dreams of millions of people are being shattered in Afghanistan right now. It's a feeling of being abandoned by the international community, by the international forces after 20 years of fighting for similar values - for freedom, for human rights, for the rights to education, the rights to free speech, the rights to self governing.
All of that is being shattered. The achievements over the past 20 years have come to zero. The ultimate losers are the Afghan civilians. And let's not forget it's not just women and girls who will be oppressed now, it will be the ethnic minority groups, the religious minority groups.
The crimes the Taliban committed towards these groups when they were in the power in the 1990s are already well known to us.
One can only hope the same thing does not happen again.
