it's obviously really hard to describe everything that's happened to 30 million people over a period of 20 years and come to a judgement on it. it's certainly beyond me. there have been some improvements in some things, some of those improvements (eg school enrollment) have fallen back quite a lot in recent years, and after the 92-96 civil war and then the Taliban vs northern alliance war from 96-01, the country was pretty destroyed, and so many of the improvements were from a low base. it's also been patchy, has played out differently in different parts of the country. in a lot of rural areas most women for example probably saw more or less no change in their status throughout. overall though, whatever gains there were do seem to be overshadowed by the fact that the NATO and US invasion gave fresh impetus to the conflict, and that has created another 20 years of an increasingly violent war that has touched every part of the country.
one thing of interest is that there was a concerted effort in all periods of the war by the US and the UK (and probably Germany, the Netherlands, France and everyone else who was fighting there, but I don't know much about them) to big up the development successes. including the usual things of exaggerating numbers, flattening out nuance, and so on. this came out of a range of different needs, but included in the US different factions of the various administrations and the foreign policy world needing to make the case to whichever president was on the throne for a continued military presence rather than pulling out, which is the cause which has just lost for the first time in 20 years in the Biden administration. both Obama and Trump faced more or less the same decision, and they both did more or less the same thing.