Love Under The Taliban.

Some Afghans had special reason to celebrate the fall of the Taliban. Even before U.S. airstrikes began last October, hundreds of families in Kabul began to flee to Iran and Pakistan. One fifth-year medical student named Najeeb found himself with the keys to three empty apartments that had belonged to neighbors and relatives. "Even though it was horrible for the Americans, it was a good time for me," he says, eyes twinkling. A dapper young man with traces of Oxford in his English and a picture of his girlfriend in his jacket pocket, Najeeb is in love. "I had the keys to three empty apartments--I could do anything I wanted, any time. I hosted my friends and their girlfriends, too. I squeezed the last drop of advantage from that time."

The collapse of the Taliban hasn't exactly spawned a libertine revolution in Afghanistan. Nearly all marriages are still arranged, and in some tribal areas women can be killed if they do not bleed on their wedding night. But especially in cities like Kabul, Afghans are finding a new romantic license--and grappling with the aftereffects of years of repression. Under the Taliban, the edict against mingling of the sexes was enforced so brutally that many people simply broke. Doctors and psychologists at Kabul Mental Hospital estimate that some 40 percent of the patients treated under the Taliban came for depression related to heartbreak. "Love is a necessity," says Dr. Ahad Awara, deputy head of Kabul Mental Hospital. "It's not just oxygen and water that keep people alive."

The Taliban had many ways of squelching any flickerings of romance. Black-turbaned storm troopers from the infamous Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue cruised the streets looking for couples; anyone deemed suspicious was interrogated and, if they were not related, carted off to jail. Intelligence officials at one of Kabul's primitive, 70-year-old telephone exchanges eavesdropped on conversations. "They were trying to find accusations to create trouble for people," says phone operator Saeed Nacir. If the Taliban found a couple having an "illegal" romantic conversation, they noted the numbers, found the addresses in a logbook in the main office and made arrests. Some convicted of adultery or prostitution were subject to gruesome public maimings or even executions in which they were crushed by a crumbling stone wall.

But Afghans, no strangers to obstacles and edicts, are famously inventive. Some used simple phone codes--three long beeps, for instance--to identify themselves to their lovers. Others wrote love letters and used small children as couriers. Jawid, 25, a student at Kabul Medical University, met his girlfriend, Nuria, three years ago by stepping on her foot in front of a grocery store. When, much later, they ventured together out of the neighborhood they shared into the streets, they concocted new, matching life stories. "I was afraid, but I proved to the Taliban that [Nuria] was my sister," says Jawid.

The surreal atmosphere produced some unions that were even more unlikely. A 22-year-old Kabul student named Latif says he cold-called numbers around Kabul for weeks trying to meet women. Once, Latif jokingly asked a woman he had called where she lived, even though he knew from the telephone prefix that the number corresponded to a house in the capital's chic Wazir Akbar Khan district. "This is no time for making fun," the woman answered. "Well," Latif asked ...