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Maybe Halim has not counted on the number of girls who think like Mashal. At 18, she wants to be a doctor. "I want to be freed from Allah," she says. "I don't want to wear a veil at all. I want to wear miniskirts." And he may not be counting on the determination of women like Fakhria, 35, a mother of four in Kabul. After the Taliban forced her from her job at a teacher-training college, she opened a secret beauty salon in her house in Kabul. A high wall shields her customers from prying eyes. Inside are pictures of female models torn from Pakistani magazines. On shelves beside a large mirror, she has a selection of lipsticks, eyeliners and hair sprays. In the West they would be commonplace. In a society that forbids them, they seem weirdly precious.

With the Taliban gone, Fakhria hopes to open a storefront salon. No blackened windows anymore to hide the forbidden faces. She also wants to go back to her teaching job. "I can make more money in a salon," she says. "But I want to pass on knowledge."

There is one kind of knowledge that all Afghan women can pass on now--what it was like to be trapped in a society that, however briefly, perfected their imprisonment.

--Reported by Hannah Beech/Dasht-i-Qaleh; Hannah Bloch and Matthew Forney/Islamabad; Terry McCarthy/Kabul; Jeff Chu/London; Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles; Alex Perry/Mazar-i-Sharif; Tim McGirk/Spin Boldak; and John F. Dickerson/Washington