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and army officers, and lawyers. Unions and associations were formed, and, occasionally, women led them. In the capital, segregation at restaurants and on public transportation was banned.
    In that progressive environment, Azita’s family settled into an upper-middle-class existence, where her father taught geography and history at the university and eventually invested in a small neighborhood store, selling paper goods, dried fruit, nuts, and other household staples. When he realized his daughter had a knack for languages, he bought her a small television set, so she could watch state newscasts broadcast in Russian and eventually translate parts of them for her parents. When Azita’s skill became known to teachers, she was singled out as a particularly talented child.
    With that, she had been chosen for a special purpose.
    As in any long game of invasion and nation building, the Soviets wanted to train the next generation of Afghan leaders and secure their loyalty to Moscow. Little Azita, who possessed a quick mind and a willingness to study, was moved to a more demanding school, with foreign teachers and Russian as the official language. She and other handpicked students would ascend through the new system’s most elite institutions—the breeding facilities for Afghanistan’s future power cluster. Their education would be crowned by a year or two of higher studies at the best universities of Moscow or Leningrad.
    Azita remembers this time being “like Europe,” in Kabul, where she would take an electric tram car to school, operated by a femaledriver. The female school uniform was a brown dress, a white apron, and brown shoes with white kneesocks. On their heads, the girl students wore only brown velvet bows.
    To the delight of her Russian teachers, teenage Azita was athletic, too, and she was made captain of the girls’ volleyball team. She planned to take her father’s academic legacy a step further, and make him even more proud of his firstborn. It did not matter that she had not been born a boy—this newly reformed country that promoted women was on her side. She would become a doctor. Failing that—which did not seem likely—she saw herself as a news anchor, inspired by the unveiled, modern women she saw on her television set. Azita was the Soviet plan for a new Afghanistan incarnate.
    But tradition still ruled in the provinces, where the political manifesto mandating equality between the sexes directly contradicted much of Pashtun tradition around inheritance and ownership.Rapid attempts at reforming society and culture were met with great resistance and fury aimed at the government for again issuing decrees to ban child marriage and the lucrative trading of women and girls, and for stating that no women should be sold for marriage, or married against her will. Once more tribal men saw the risk of losing both cash and influence. If women were to be educated and work outside the home, they would “dishonor” their families by being seen in public and potentially develop other, even more subversive ideas. And who would care for the children if women took over the tasks of men? Society would undoubtedly fall apart. Worst of all, another proposed decree would allow women to initiate divorce more easily. Clearly, foreign influence brought decadence and subverted Afghan traditions. The reforms were declared un-Islamic by many religious mullahs.
    Meanwhile, armed resistance to the Soviet occupation built around the country. Parts of the mujahideen opposition to the Soviet occupation had found a sympathetic ally in the Pashtuns next door in Pakistan, who were eager to exert influence in Afghanistan. The Soviet-instituted reforms proved to be an efficient pretext forrecruiting followers: Women’s education as well as all women’s rights were despicable, pernicious poison-pill notions that stood to destroy the very fundament of Afghanistan’s culture and way of life.
    Power has always been held by those who manage