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family legend, had fallen in love with her at first sight. They waited seven years to marry, and in 1977, their first child arrived, a much-loved and longed-for daughter. They named her after the Persian word derived from fire, or
azar
. Soon after celebrating Azita’s first birthday the family returned to build a life in Kabul, arriving just in time for theSaur Revolution, when the Communist People’s Democratic Party took over the Afghan government.
    With ideological and financial backing from Moscow, the new leadership proclaimed aggressive reforms,setting out to replace religious law with a more secular system, promoting state atheism, and forcefully trying to establish a more modern society. Each business sector and each official institution was to be overhauled, from agriculture and the legal system to health care and—most controversially—family law.
    The Russians were not the first to try to effect gender parity in Afghanistan, nor would they be the last.
    Amanollah Khan had tried to assert rights for women in the 1920s, together with his queenSoraya, who famously cast off her veil in public. The royal couple also began promoting the education of girls, banned the selling of them for marriage, and put restrictions onpolygyny. The backlash was severe. To many Afghans, and particularly to the majority who did not live in Kabul, the reforms seemed outrageous: Tribal men would lose future income if daughters could no longer be sold or traded as wives. In 1929, under threat of a coup, the king was forced to abdicate.
    Three decades later, King Mohammad Zahir Shah made another, more cautious push for educating and emancipating women, proposing to grant themequal rights in the Constitution of 1964, and the right to vote. Privileged Afghan women were sent abroad for university studies, returning to become professionals and academics.
    Arline Lederman, an American development professional who taught at Kabul University in the early 1970s, remembers “a thrilling time” when elite Afghan women were more sophisticated than most of their liberal American counterparts. Women of Kabul’s royal family who wore raincoats, sunglasses, and Hermès head scarves and gloves “could have passed for Jackie Kennedy’s friends on an autumn day in Boston,” she observed.
    Those advances of a small group of elite women were significant, but they were exclusive to Kabul and a handful of other urban areas. In the rest of the country, women’s roles were largely stagnant.
    When Communist-era reforms rolled out on a large scale in the 1980s, however, they did not settle for the small elite in Kabul. In this new era, women and girls would no longer live in seclusion—they wouldreceive mandatory educations, freely choose whom to marry, and be active participants in a new society. After the massive Soviet military force arrived to prop up the fragile Kabul Communist government, thousands of government-employed Russians also landed in Kabul to help execute Moscow’s idealized plan for a new Afghanistan.
    Agrarians, engineers, aid workers, teachers, and architects began to set up large-scale foreign aid projects with Soviet expertise. The programs were targeted toward turning around the whole country, and quickly. The Soviet leadership, which prided itself on having built an ideal, superior society at home, initially did not place muchweight on historical references or failures by others who had come before them.
    One clearly stated goal was to educate and introduce more women in the workforce. The idea was sound: Only by gaining real economic power would women have the chance to gain real rights and redress imbalances. The execution would eventually prove to be as misguided as in previous attempts, with only a gradual and late understanding of the deep-rooted economics of patriarchy in the countryside.
    But in Kabul, a few female Afghan ministers and parliamentarians were appointed. Others took up work as doctors and journalists, police