As soon as the Taliban fell, Afghan men lined up at barbershops to have their beards shaved off. Women painted their nails with once-forbidden polish. Formerly clandestine beauty salons opened in prominent locations. Men traded postcards of beautiful Indian movie stars, and thronged to bujy imported TVs, VCRs, and videotapes. Even burka merchants diversified their wares, adding colors like brown, peach and gree to the blue and off-white dictated by the Taliban's whip-wielding virtue police. Freed to travel to city markets, village women demanded better fabric, finer embroidery and more variety in their traditional garments.

When a Michigan hairdresser went to Kabul with a group of doctors, nurses, dentists and social workers, she intended to serve as an all-purpose assisstant to the relief mission's professionals. Instead, she found her own services every bit as popular as the serious business of health and welfare. "When word got out that there was a hairdresser in the country, it just got crazy," she said. "I was doing haircuts every fifteen minutes."

Liberation is supposed to be about grave matters: elections, education, a free press. But Afghans acted as though superficial things were just as important. As a political commentator noted, "The right to shave may be found in no international treaty or covenant, but it has, in Afghanistan, become one of the first freedoms to which claim is being laid."