For many Afghan women, bare faces and lives resumed

What that meant for young women like Ghazal - who had to quit her literature studies at Kabul University with just one year of studies left before graduation - was a descent into hopelessness. One of the toughest memories of Taliban rule she carries occurred in the first days they came to Kabul: The sleeves of a woman in the bazaar were deemed too short by a Taliban enforcer. She was beaten so severely with a cable that she collapsed and was rushed to a hospital.

Ghazal says she rarely left home after that. For work, she could only teach young children in her own home.

A bright spirit with an easy smile, she nevertheless sent poetry to local newspapers. But her feminine voice was forbidden for broadcast. She thought her two-year-old radio career - reading poetry for all of Radio Afghanistan's programs that included poems - was over.

"We had a lot of educated women, but the majority have left Kabul. They weren't able to suffer through the Taliban," she says. Her friends wanted her to go, too, but she couldn't bring herself to leave. "I love my country. I wouldn't leave it," she says.

The Northern Alliance rebels who have taken control of Kabul and all of northern Afghanistan in the past week do not restrict women by enforcing rules, though they can be as "protective" as any Taliban official of women in their own families, and burqas are common in alliance territory.

They recognize the denigrate role women played under the Taliban, though. One rebel commander even jokes that if his forces didn't topple the Taliban, "I'm sure the women will kill the Taliban themselves."

Playing on that image, propaganda leaflets dropped into Afghanistan by American psychological operations teams from planes show a photograph of a turbaned Taliban "Virtue" enforcer, beating a row of women in burqas with a truncheon. The words read: "Do you want such a life for your wife and children?"

Many Afghan women say "no." "We weren't able to walk down the road," complains Qandigul, as she waits in line for a meal ticket, wearing a burqa. "We couldn't send our girls to school. Our children were in the dark."

While mothers say they have already been asking the new authorities to begin admitting girls to schools, for budding professionals like Ghazal, the harm has already been done by five fallow years. "Many women lost much in their minds, because they were forced to stay home," she says, tapping a white leather shoe on the floor at the memory of the anxiety. "We want to be in sophisticated positions. But women have been so damaged. If they were allowed, they would now be doctors, engineers, and professors. Now there are hardly any."

She can't wait to renew her studies for her diploma, but also recognizes that Taliban rules do fit for some. "There are many women who want to wear a burqa, for religious and cultural reasons," Ghazal says.

But for her, the choice is clear. "My burqa is at home," she says. When asked if she will ever wear it again, she answers with a smile on her face, before she gives voice to the word: "Never!"

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