Reader, she married an Afghan warlord

Kabul, Feb 9: "HONEY, don't come home now, we've got warlords in the living room," is hardly your typical excuse for a husband who fears his wife interrupting a night in with the lads.

But for Debbie Rodriguez it has become such a common refrain that she has set up Kabul's first coffee bar as somewhere to wait.

The crimson-haired hairdresser from America's Midwest who came to Afghanistan to train its women in highlights and Brazilian waxing, has ended up married to a key commander for one of the country's most brutal warlords in the unlikeliest of post-Taliban alliances.

The "I'm a D girl" slogan emblazoned across her tight black T-shirt refers not to an ample breast but to General Abdul Rashid Dostum, the boss of her husband Sher. The whisky-drinking Uzbek warlord from northern Afghanistan is best known for running over his enemies with tanks, and his men were accused of suffocating hundreds of Taliban prisoners in shipping containers in 2001.

"The general has always been kind, gentle and sweet to me," said Rodriguez, 46, brushing the Kabul mud and snow off her jeans and warming her hands on a latte in her cafe. "He calls me 'Sher's long American' and has embraced me into the family. He's not this evil figure westerners believe. He's stopped drinking and he just wants peace."

She admits, however, that when anyone mentions the Taliban plaguing the British forces in southern Afghanistan, Dostum growls: "If they just gave me three months, I'd sort them out."

After three years of marriage, Rodriguez is accustomed to the Kalashnikov by the bed. But she still gets fed up with the general's summonses at any time of day or night. "Sometimes I'm like, 'Does he not own a watch?' " Rodriguez is well known in Kabul as "Debbie the hairdresser". She is the driving force behind the Kabul Beauty School which has trained more than 170 Afghan women and is the subject of her forthcoming book.

A hairdresser since the age of 15 in her mother's salon in Michigan, Rodriguez was moved by the September 11 attacks to help a disaster relief unit at ground zero in New York. For two weeks she gave massages to fire-fighters. "There is a link between physical touch and emotion and many of them really let loose," she said.

When the unit decided to set up clinics for women in Afghanistan, she begged to go along as a nurse's assistant. "I didn't know what I could do, but I just felt so much for how those women had suffered under the Taliban, maybe because I was in an abusive marriage myself that I wanted to escape."

Somehow word got out that a hairdresser was in town and Rodriguez would come back at night to her hotel room to find her door plastered with Post-it notes from journalists and aid workers begging: "Please cut my hair!" "It was like people in the desert dying for water," she laughs. "I was doing 30 haircuts a day.

"I knew the Taliban had banned beauty salons, but I couldn't understand why there weren't any operating by then, because cutting hair is not a skill you lose. I wandered all over Kabul looking. Eventually after three days I found one and I was shocked.

"They were trying to do hair with the most medieval equipment I'd ever seen. Scissors that looked like hedge-trimmers, broken mirrors, sticks for rollers, no electricity. It was like this moment of truth. Do you walk away and pretend you've never seen it or do something?" With her mother impatient for her to return to the salon and two children at college, Rodriguez initially thought she would go back, send some suitcases full of scissors and hair products and get on with her own life. "But then someone said to me, 'Don't give them a fish, teach them to fish'. It had never occurred to me that hairdressing could be part of the aid effort."

Back in Michigan, she called the number on the back of a bottle of Paul Mitchell shampoo. "I left a message saying, 'Hi, I'm Debs, I just came back from Afghanistan. The Taliban annihilated the beauty industry and we should put a school there and I want you to help me'."

Two days later the owner called and asked: "What do you need?" Rodriguez secured other donations and soon her garage was filled with 10,000 boxes of products. Another group of New York beauticians had had the same idea and between them the first Kabul Beauty School was born. Rodriguez returned to Afghanistan and in 2003 trained her first class in an outbuilding of the Ministry of Women's Affairs.

She found it extremely rewarding, with more than 90% of her graduates finding jobs. Despite Kabul's drabness, beauty is a lucrative business, particularly in preparing brides for their big day.

But running the school was a struggle. "Afghanistan dropped off the map when Iraq happened," she said. "Donations dried up."

The school lost its premises in the ministry for what she says were political and cultural reasons. The girls were denounced for "too much laughing", and the ministry accused her of stealing donations.

But Rodriguez is far too forceful a character to give up. "In many ways me and my warlord husband are the same. We're both warriors." Now she runs the Oasis Salon, where students work on the ground floor of the home she shares with Sher.

The couple were introduced by mutual friends in October 2003 and married within 20 days, despite being unable to speak a word of each other's language. "We didn't really notice because this other couple were already around translating. When we were alone he would play computer games and I would watch videos."

On top of that, he was 12 years younger and already had a wife and eight children living in Saudi Arabia. But because of his position as Dostum's foreign relations adviser and nephew of the minister for hajj (pilgrimage), Sher could not afford to be caught dating an American. "He said we either do it the Afghan way or stop seeing each other."

Asked what he meant by the Afghan way, he said: "Get married." "First I thought he was joking, then I thought, why not? It was like jumping off a cliff but my gut instinct said yes."

She admits that her gut had led her into two previous failed marriages, the second of which was to a travelling preacher who beat her up.

The couple did not tell their families at first. "His family are really conservative, they live in Mecca. I'm a Christian, I smoke, I'm a hairdresser and an American. I might as well be Satan."

Her parents found out from an article about the beauty salon which mentioned she had married an Afghan. For a long while he refused to tell his. "I felt a bit like the mistress."

It was this that made Dostum's endorsement so important. "I wanted someone important to Sher to acknowledge me." These days the pair are regulars at Dostum's palace, listening to his war stories late into the night.

Sher has learnt English, she has picked up some Farsi and they spend all year together, except for one month when he goes to his other family in Saudi. Their house is often filled with other commanders so she used her book advance from Random House to open the coffee house. A cosy place with colourful prints and jazz on the speakers, it has become a popular refuge.

"What can I say?" she shrugs. "I know it's weird. I married a warlord. What else does a girl from the Midwest do in Afghanistan, apart from becoming a hairdresser?"

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