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Following the Soviet invasion, the Communists, to their credit, passed decrees making girls_ education compulsory and abolishing certain oppressive tribal customs__uch as the bride-price, a payment to the bride__ family in return for her hand in marriage. However, by massacring thousands of tribal elders, they paved the way for the __ommanders_ to step in as the new elite. Aided by American and Saudi patronage, extremism flourished. What had once been a social practice confined to areas deep in the hinterlands now became a political practice, which, according to ideologues, applied to the entire country. The modest gains of urban women were erased.__he first time a woman enters her husband__ house," Heela __old me about life in the countryside, __he wears white___er wedding dress___nd the first time she leaves, she wears white___he color of the Muslim funeral shroud. The rules of this arrangement were intricate and precise, and, it seemed to Heela, unchanged from time immemorial. In Uruzgan, a woman did not step outside her compound. In an emergency, she required the company of a male blood relative to leave, and then only with her father__ or husband__ permission. Even the sound of her voice carried a hint of subversion, so she was kept out of hearing range of unrelated males. When the man of the house was not present, boys were dispatched to greet visitors. Unrelated males also did not inquire directly about a female member of the house. Asking __ow is your wife?_ qualified as somewhere between uncomfortably impolite and downright boorish. The markers of a woman__ life__irths, anniversaries, funerals, prayers, feasts__xisted entirely within the four walls of her home. Gossip, hopscotching from living room to living room, was carried by husbands or sons.