Meet Zahira Zahir, candid clipper of America's commanders in chief.

Her full-service salon at the Watergate Hotel can promote talking points during appointments with free sodas, pasta salad and sandwiches. She has made friends by grooming and pampering the powerful on "both sides of the aisle," as she likes to say with studied Washingtonian savvy. She has a lucrative business, but she's also on a mission: to raise money for educating girls in Afghanistan.

Zahir moved to New York in the mid-1970s when her husband became the Afghan envoy to the United Nations. Her father, Abdul Zahir, who had served as prime minister under King Mohammed Zahir Shah, encouraged her to find something there she liked to do, so she became a beautician.

When Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in 1979, she lost the power and privilege into which she had been born. Her brother and other relatives were killed. Homes, property and bank accounts were confiscated. Her father was placed under house arrest.

She relocated to Washington in the early 1980s. Milton Pitts, her first employer in Washington at the old Sheraton-Carlton Hotel, soon asked her to give Ronald Reagan a manicure at the White House as he cut the president's hair, but she resisted. "My life had changed. It was devastating to become poor, and I did not want to look into my past," she said, not wanting to be reminded of the good life she'd lost.

She relented, and on the way to the appointment, she prayed Reagan would dislike her. "Who is this?" she recalled Reagan asking. He then proceeded to ask whether his administration should give the Stinger missiles to Afghanistan's mujahedeen as the Senate was trying to block such aid. She argued for the Stingers.

"You did not totally convince me, young lady," she said he told her. "You have to continue this discussion in 12 days" — time for his next haircut. Zahir begged God to ignore her earlier prayers.

Zahir later met his vice president, George Bush, now the honorary board chairman for the Friends of Zahira's Schools foundation, which raises money for girls schools in Afghanistan. She also cuts his son's hair on Pennsylvania Avenue. Other customers include Alexander Haig, James Baker and opera star Placido Domingo.

The week at the salon, Zahir's daughter Angela was filing the nails of New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, the former energy secretary. He had traveled 2,000 miles for a meeting or two, a haircut at Zahira's, a manicure and pedicure.

"Are you running for president?" Angela asked him. "You Democrats are a sorry-looking bunch."

"Sharpen those nails," he joked back.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Zahir recalled, she was at the White House, doing first mum Barbara Bush's hair. The next day, a concerned elder Bush telephoned her. "I hope you're OK and that no one thinks you have anything to do with this," she said he told her.

"I lost 25 of my regular clients. Cancellations continued for a month," she said. When the elder Bush heard, he sent her an autographed photo of himself and four other former U.S. presidents. "If you need to, sell it," he told her.

"I was so touched, I cried," Zahir said. "It did not hurt so much when people who did not know better reacted negatively, simple folk with no education. But coming from people who you know have university degrees, the crème de la crème, that shocked me."

Zahir then excused herself: "I have to tell the governor to tuck his shirt in."

She did not forget to pass on to him what some Afghans had told her: "Please tell the American people we have not learned how to walk yet. Please don't leave us alone," she told Richardson.

"My haircuts here are seminars. I enjoy them, and I excuse Zahira her Bush leanings," Richardson said teasingly. "I can tell he is a good man because of the way he treats Zahira."

Zahir, who recently returned from Kabul, said, "I raised money to rebuild the school that made me what I am and went home for the first time since 1975 with $216,000."

When an Afghan contractor, apparently hoping for a bribe, stonewalled on giving her a list of schools needing repairs, she stormed out of the meeting. "Either my Farsi has gone rusty after 28 years, you don't want to cooperate, or you are so stupid. You don't get it," she said she told him. She said a representative of President Hamid Karzai and his education minister came with the list and personal apologies the next day.

"I am tough. That's why I survive," she said. "I am fighting for people who have no voice."