The Afghan fighter sat cross-legged on top of a desk that was perched on the porch of the gate lodge, so that his bare feet were at eye-level. Yes, Radio Jabal Saraj, the new mouthpiece of the Northern Alliance, was located inside. The radio station has received private French funding - a dubious commitment if ever there was one - and has broadcast reports on the evils of the Taliban and alleged defections for the past month.
A colleague offered the name of the Frenchman who set up the radio station. The gunmen at the gate must let us in, he insisted. The mujahed scraped the dirt between his toes with his fingernails and stared into the middle distance.
"All right," he finally said to the male reporter. "You can go in. But women are not allowed here. She must go and sit in the car."
Afghan women endure a thousand humiliations daily, but this was the most blatant example I'd encountered. Little matter that I wear a headscarf and baggy black coat out of respect for local custom. I am a woman, hence inferior, subhuman.
The oppression of Afghan women is all the more painful because they enjoyed relative equality from the late 1950s through to the Soviet occupation, which ended in 1989.
Traditionalists' horror at the freedoms accorded by the pro-Soviet regime helped fuel their jihad. Female university students in Kabul were sprayed with acid. A woman mini-bus driver was dragged from her vehicle and stabbed to death by fundamentalists.
When the late Commander Ahmed Shah Massoud and President Burhannudin Rabbani ruled from 1992 until 1996, they removed an allusion to womens' rights from the constitution and broadcast television messages telling women to cover their hair and refrain from using lipstick or gathering or laughing in public.
They said it was better if women did not work, and blotted out female faces on television with flowers. During those four years of anarchy, which culminated in the Taliban victory, countless women were raped and murdered by mujahedeen. The United Front, or Northern Alliance claims it treats women better than the Taliban, but in the 10 per cent of Afghanistan controlled by the Front today, all women wear the chadri, the tent-like garment with a mesh window to see out of.
"You can't see anything. You're too hot," says Nazia Ghafouri (21), a refugee from Kabul who wants to go to medical school if the war ever ends.
"When you go to the souk, you can't even see what you're buying - you touch things and choose by instinct. It cuts you off from the outside world; all you want to do is take it off."
Her dream, Nazia says, "is to take off my chadri and return to university". But such possibilities are not on offer from any of the factions in Afghanistan.
Unlike the Alliance, the Taliban have codified their misogyny in law. Under the Taliban, women are not allowed to travel abroad and decrees ban them from working or visiting public places.
Women who let their chadris slip and inadvertently show an ankle or wrist have been beaten with bicycle chains.
In theory, women in United Front zones are free to go to school and work, but in practice they fare little better than under Taliban rule.
If a woman goes to the market with her face uncovered, a crowd of gawking gunmen forms around her.
"Go away! Leave me alone!" I shouted at them the other day at the souk in Jabal Saraj.
An interpreter translated my words and one man shouted back defiantly: "We are mujahedeed!" Zahal Zara, the matronly 45-year-old wife of the Northern Alliance's "education minister", is one of the few people trying to improve the plight of women here.
She had to flee her job as director of Zarouna girls' high school in Kabul when the Taliban came to power, but still believes that education is the only way to free Afghan women.
At a small co-operative in Golbahar, on the Shomali Plain, Mrs Zara has trained three female teachers and holds embroidery classes for 50.
Mrs Zara says she is the only non-foreign woman in Afghanistan who dares go out with her face uncovered, though she wears a floor length skirt, baggy jacket and black headscarf.
"The looks I get . . . Everyone stares at me, but I don't give a damn."
She makes excuses for the poor behaviour of the Front's fighters. "The free zones are the most rural areas in Afghanistan. This is a backward countryside where women - and often men - have never left the village. The men are much more conservative here."
A disillusioned United Front supporter criticises the Front's commanders, who exercise a medieval droit de seigneur. "Most of them have two, three, four wives. Whenever they hear of a beautiful girl, they want to marry her - by money or by force."
Amid preparations for an assault on Kabul, the gossip here is of the tension in Totemdara. A commander there asked a villager for his daughter, but the villager refused. All Shomali waits to see what will happen.
A few days ago, a lovely girl with green eyes and fair hair watched me from an alley in a front line village. Myeloma wore frayed, dirty gold brocade trousers and a matching tunic, and held her sickly sister on one hip.
She did not know her age, but looked to be about eight years old. She had gone once to Kabul, where "everything is beautiful".
I asked Malema which of her six brothers and sisters was her favourite.
"My brother Shalala," she answered immediately. Why? "He's 18 and he has a gun," the little girl answered proudly.
The interpreter suddenly panicked. "We must go. We must go. If the commander sees the women in the street, he will be very angry."
I looked up to see seven or eight women peering around the corner to watch my conversation with Malema - showing their faces.
To calm the interpreter, I went back into the cul-de-sac alone, where the women - from toothless grannies to a teenager with two babies - beamed and giggled as they shook my hand.
The commander's arrival put an abrupt end to our meeting. "Why did you let her do that?" he scolded the interpreter.
Later, when I asked the commander why Afghan women are confined to their houses, he said it was "because Afghans are proud".
The idea that a woman might choose her husband was inconceivable. "If a girl says to her parents, 'I like that boy', they will kill her," he told me.
It is up to the mother to find brides for her sons - usually among cousins - a guarantee that they will be virgins.
"The groom's parents take sweets to the bride's house. If they accept, it's a deal."
During the 1991 Gulf War, a group of Saudi women were punished for holding a demonstration to be allowed to drive cars.
Women's rights was one of many issues that were supposed to be addressed after the war, but it never happened. So why should this war improve the fate of Afghan women?
I thought sadly of Malema, and I knew that whatever the outcome of George Bush's war on bin Laden, the pretty little girl will never learn to read or write, will be married off to someone she has never seen, and imprisoned in her house, forever in thrall to a man with a gun.