WASHINGTON — There's a lot Zahira Zahir could tell President Bush — if she wanted to.
The Afghan native meets Bush twice a month at the White House to give him his regular $30 haircut. She doesn't press her opinions on him, although sometimes he asks.
"It's the only peaceful half-hour the poor guy has," she recently told The Times of London.
The daughter of a former prime minister, Zahir has plenty of opinions.
She supports the U.S.-led military operation in her homeland and would like to see Mohammad Zaher Shah, the 87-year-old exiled Afghan king who was a guest at her wedding, return to power. And she hopes the world will rally around her poor country when the war ends.
But she tries to focus her one-on-ones with Bush on hair — his.
"I go as a hairdresser or a barber, not as their consultant person," Zahir told CNN. "I am not their adviser, and that is why I have been very successful in my business. I mind my own business."
After some media exposure, Zahir declined to be interviewed by the Associated Press, apparently after the privacy-conscious White House frowned on the publicity she was getting.
Zahir, 56, grew up in the Afghan capital of Kabul, the daughter of Abdul Zahir, who served as Afghanistan's prime minister for 18 months in the early 1970s. A naturalized U.S. citizen, she arrived in New York in 1975 after her ex-husband became Afghanistan's deputy ambassador to the United Nations.
Everything changed four years later when the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan made returning too dangerous. Zahir began cutting hair to help support her then-unemployed husband and three young children.
She moved to Washington in 1985 and found a job with President Reagan's barber, Milton Pitts.
Since Sept. 11, the salon Zahir named after herself in the tony Watergate complex has lost about two dozen regulars and was deserted one afternoon this week, except for a receptionist.
It saddens Zahir to think they may have quit coming because she's from Afghanistan.
But Bush, who sits for his trims in an upstairs salon in the family quarters of the White House, remains loyal.
"I was pleasantly surprised that the president didn't fire me or didn't stop letting me come cut his hair," Zahir said. "That shows you the character and the personality of the person and the country."