The Taliban may be gone but the pain of war will stay with nine-year-old Tortikar for a long time to come.
Lying in a stinking, blood stained bed in Sehat-e-Amma public health hospital in Jalalabad, the young girl is one of the hundreds of innocent victims of the American campaign against bin Laden and the Taliban.
Tortikar lives in Sokrouth in the foothills of the Torkhar, or black Mountain, in Laghamn province about 50 km north of Jalalabad. Three weeks ago she was playing happily outside when US bombs, intended for al-Qaeda caves, fell on her village.
Thirty-five people were killed by the stray bomb. Tortikar was badly injured and suffered serious burns on her chest, neck and arm.
Yesterday Tortikar screamed as nurses changed her wound dressing. She is one of five young children from Sokrouth still being treated in the hospital with injuries from the bombing that day.
Sehat-e-Amma is like other hospitals I have seen in Pakistan in the last two months, or probably a step below. Patients lie on filthy beds. The corridors are squalid. Equipment and medicines are virtually non existent. The hospital depends on the Red Cross for supplies. It is a breeding ground for infection.
When we arrived, a mother sat on the floor of the reception hall with her ill four-month-old baby daughter in her arms looking for help. Most patients don't even have the dignity of a dirty sheet on their bed. Three-year-old Rangina, another Sokrouth bomb victim, had both her legs bandaged. She sat on a black mattress with foam showing through.
Her grandmother fed her bits of bread and a glass of cold tea. She said she had to buy the medicines for her granddaughter and her father also died in the bombing attack.
Staff in the hospital say they have not been paid for six months. When they were getting paid, doctors were getting only $14 a month and nurses $10, according to Dr Ashequallah, a surgeon.
"But we just have to continue as best we can. We are hoping that things will begin to improve now the Taliban are gone. We can only supply certain medicines and it is up to the patients to get the rest. Times have been very bad. We hope for a better future."
He said the hospital treated up to 100 bomb victims in the last six weeks. Most of them have been released at this stage. The five children still in the children's ward were among the most seriously wounded.
Nurse Shirin Sahar tends to seven-year-old Khalide who has serious abdomen wounds. Her grandmother said five other family members were killed in the bombing.
Nurse Sahar was nursing in Kabul in 1996 when the Taliban took power, but was forced to leave her job as the Taliban decreed women could not work in professional jobs. Six months ago, she got a job in this hospital where the rule was not strictly enforced.
"Our life was so bad under the Taliban. I am so glad they are gone. All the women of Afghanistan have had a bad time. We now rejoice and hope for the future."
In Jalalabad yesterday, people were getting on with their lives. Some schools reopened for the first time since September 11th. The market was bustling, and work restarted on a new indoor bazaar and office building.
But the guns were still in evidence. Young men holding AK47s were hanging out of pick-up trucks speeding through the city. It was impossible to make out what Mujahideen group they belonged to.
Every so often gun fire could be heard. In the morning, mortar fire went off - young men fooling around with their arms for fun.
The newly-elected governors' promise to disarm the population has not been delivered on yet.
For little Tortikar, the Taliban's departure from east Afghanistan will not ease her pain. She will have the mark of the United States campaign against bin Laden with her for the rest of her life.