The Face of Liberation, Unshrouded

With the Taliban on the run, newspapers and television are beginning to bring images of freedom from Afghanistan. The faces of Afghan women, gazing squarely at the camera, their mandatory head-to-toe shrouds finally cast aside; children playing soccer like kids everywhere, and in cities where the Taliban has fled, laughter and celebration.

If Cicero was right 2000 years ago when he observed that “freedom suppressed and again regained bites with keener fangs than freedom never endangered,” then the fangs of many Afghan women are now especially sharp. Where women once studied and worked alongside men, the Taliban rendered them mute and invisible, forbidden to work, barred from schools and beaten for allowing an ankle to show from beneath their burkas.

As Taliban troops escape to the mountains, more turmoil and violence will surely follow in their wake. Nonetheless, now is one of those once-in-a-generation moments when freedom has a face, thousands of women’s faces, in fact, appearing in the streets, bared to the winter sun, singing, laughing. And now what it means to be liberated from oppression, whether imposed by ideology or religion or just brute force, is no longer a dry civics lesson but a real, live show in our living rooms every evening, one that American schoolchildren shouldn’t miss.