Even as shells were still flitting about Kunduz's main drag and dawdling Talibs were holding out at the airport three miles away, the answer became clear: In the New Afghanistan, anything goes. Kunduz's newly liberated bazaar, always a festival of free-wheeling capitalism in Central Asia, instantaneously assumed an even more manic tone. Until November 26, the notoriously violent officers of the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (or, informally, the Religious Police) thrashed and jailed men whose beards were too short and women whose burkas showed a little ankle. On the 27th, for 300,000 afghanis (about $5) you could rent a TV, DVD player, and a grab bag of discs of dubious parentage overnight. Television, banned by the eminently uptight Taliban as decadent and foreign, had survived its rule in secret stashes. But now the titles have expanded from such third-world staples as Schwarzenegger's Commando and Van Damme's Universal Soldier to Thounders Boobs (sic), Climaxic Dyldoos (sic), and for mujahideen whose sexual preferences extend beyond or in lieu of their permitted four wives, Manroot, Twice as Long.
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