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Ali [impatiently]: Of course.

“The Taliban was 95 percent of our country,” an Afghan friend told me. “Look around you. We didn’t kill everybody.”

Whenever the translator, Naseer, took me to his house, I could feel the knowledge of Taliban lurking among the women. We’d drop by in the afternoon, and I’d sit for a time with these spectacular women, their cheeks and eyes full of light. They fussed over me, flounced around, touched my hands and my face, giggled and cooed. I was a piece of the world, delivered to them in their cloisters, and although we could not trade a word, they lavished me with emotion. Their husbands were doctors and merchants and engineers, but none of these women had the equivalent of a middle-school education.

In the middle of fruitless pantomime, Naseer’s niece turned on him one day. “You know English, and you never taught us!” she lashed out, eyes narrow in her face. Her name was Rina. She was fifteen years old, already promised in marriage to a cousin. “You should have taught us English!”

These women had been waiting in these dim rooms for years, waiting so long that they had turned anticipation into a state of grace. They had waited for the neighborhood schools to reopen, for permission to show their faces in public, and for the right to walk out the front gate to the mud road. Waited for decades of war to pass out of these valleys and farms, for one government after the next to swell and crumble, for untested men to rush forward to unleash new laws. They learned from the BBC’s scratchy Pashto-language service that the Taliban was gone, but so what? Still they waited for their world to change. The women in Naseer’s house were not liberated beings. They couldn’t remember the last time they shopped in the bazaar, or ate a picnic, or strolled in a park. They couldn’t even buy their own vegetables. They had learned their lesson swiftly when the Taliban took over.

“We knew they hated women, and we were afraid,” Naseer’s wife, Sediqa, told me. “They said we had to wear our burqas, so we wore them. But they beat us anyway. We knew it wasn’t safe to go out into the streets.”

Everybody remembered keenly the day in 1996 when the seventy-five-year-old matriarch next door set out across town to visit her daughter. She had no money for a taxi, so she walked. The Taliban hadn’t been in power long, and Afghans were still discovering restrictions by trial and error. The old woman didn’t wear a burqa, because she was frail and nearsighted and the netted face covering was uncomfortable. She was halted by the religious police, who hollered that her robes and head scarf were immodest, that she was violating the laws of Islam. They beat her with lead rods and bamboo canes, dragged her home bruised and bloodied, and scolded the family for letting the woman wander the streets without proper dress. After that, by their own will or by mandate of their husbands, all the women on Naseer’s street were locked away.

“I knew then that I hated the Taliban, and they were different. Other times, things had been bad. But nobody had beaten an old woman before,” the woman’s daughter told me. She had slipped into Naseer’s house, curious to visit with the American.

Sitting on mattresses on the floor with these women, I felt that I had tunneled deep down into the middle of the earth. Their tiny universe—tight rooms with dirt floors strung around a muddy courtyard—felt sealed off from Jalalabad. This was only the first layer of withdrawal: Jalalabad was far removed from Kabul, and Kabul from the rest of the world. Still, because of September 11, Americans were aware of the women who dwelled in this forgotten place. Worse, popular imagination back home already considered them liberated by U.S. benevolence. As if the freedom of these women, caught in the strings of their marriages, family honor, tribal code, and morality police, could come so cheap. I got Naseer to translate our conversations, and I learned that the women themselves knew better; knew enough not to get excited.