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This is a very broad question, as there are many countries and cultures in which Islam is practiced. Some of these countries do grant women the same rights as men. In many of them, it's common for women to become doctors and lawyers, and as of 2004, Iran had more women in congress than the United States.
Other countries don't grant women as many rights, just as there are some Middle Eastern countries in which Christianity is the dominant religion, and they don't give women as many rights as men either. This is really more of a cultural issue than a religious one. Many of these cultures, which just happen to practice Islam, simply haven't progressed as much as Western culture has. Many of them do still have traditions which are considered outdated to us, such as stoning a woman for not being a virgin, or having parents choose their children's spouses.
In the case of Afghanistan, that's a rather unique situation, in that the country was previously more "modern" in terms of women's rights than it is now. The reason women are now oppressed there is because it's run by the Taliban, a radical, religious sect which believes in a very strict and rare interpretation of the Koran. The mainstream news media has made this into an issue of women's rights, but the truth is that the Taliban oppresses both men and women. Taliban soldiers have entered men's homes and murdered them in cold blood without any justification, and Taliban laws are very oppressive to both genders. For example, it's against the law for a person of either sex to listen to music. The issue in Afghanistan isn't one of women, but one of people.
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Women in Islam...what happened?
