The people of Kabul could not wait to be liberated yesterday - instead they came out of the city in their thousands to meet the army.
As dawn broke, the road leading up to the front line positions of the Northern Alliance was crowded with men and boys, all eager to see the tanks which had arrived the night before.
From the other direction came refugees in jeeps and pickup trucks and journalists. At first the army refused to let them through, parking a tank across the road. Those coming out of the city shouted that the Taliban had gone and it was quite safe.
Finally there were so many people and so many jeeps that the army gave way.
The tank was moved from the road and the jeeps moved off: The liberation of Kabul had begun.
In a great convoy we drove around the winding Salang Highway, the last six kilometers into the city. Around one bend Kabul suddenly appeared, gleaming in the morning sunlight. And in front of us, stretching along the broad boulevards, were thousands more people.
As we drove through them, they cheered and waved, a sea of happy faces. "Welcome to Kabul City!" shouted one man in perfect English.
On every street and every junction were large groups of people, all talking at once or cheering as journalists and refugees went by. Cars raced up and down the streets, horns tooting, and dozens of children arrived on bicycles, madly ringing their bells.
Everyone said the same thing. The Taliban regime, after seven long years of rule, had gone. They pulled out at eight o'clock the night before, at about the same time that news arrived that the front line north of the city had been smashed by Northern Alliance forces.
There are few signs of destruction - a few official buildings have their roofs smashed in by the hammer blows of American air strikes. But the bombing appears to have hit its targets, while avoiding residential areas.
In the blue sky above a B-52 made an almost perfect wide circle as it prowled about. But there are no targets today, and so, as if bored by the experience, the plane heaved itself away and flew away south.
By the time the Northern Alliance swept into Kabul, the only Taliban left were to be found in the city's pretty Sharinow Park. Five Pakistani volunteers who had come to fight with the Taliban were lying, glassy-eyed, in a ditch.
They had been killed a few hours before. One had his plastic identity card stuffed in his mouth. A second had his skull smashed and a banknote stuck inside. Another banknote was rammed into the nose of a third body.
Apparently these men had not heard about the Taliban withdrawal of the night before and were caught in the morning trying to escape.
Nearby lay a jeep torn to pieces and burned out, apparently by an anti-tank rocket. The bodies of four Arabic Taliban fighters lay nearby. A large crowd gathered and men kicked the bodies.
The Pakistani embassy was looted at dawn and books and papers were, by midday, lying scattered over the building. Pakistan is the only country still to recognise the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afgahnistan.
All across the city, people began to do all the things banned by the Taliban. Young boys went kite-flying in the Sharinow Park, and men lined up to get their beards cut - beards were compulsory for all men in Taliban-controlled Kabul.
"I have never had so much work," said Parwana, a city centre barber.
Music, also banned by the Taliban, was back with a vengence. Car drivers brought out car stereo systems long since hidden from the Taliban.
A white Land Cruiser drove by with a powerful drumbeat coming from its stereo and all the occupants moving to the rhythm.
There were emotional reunions as the first refugees found loved ones.
My translator bumped into a friend of his, Feridun, a computer technician.
After hugs and greetings, Feridun said: "It's so good just to walk in the street. I feel like I am free." So did everyone else.
Cars drove at crazy speeds, there were several near misses, and one old man on his bicycle rode straight into the path of our car, which avoided him with a screech of brakes and a blast of the horn. "Don't worry about him," said Feridun. "He's like everyone in this city, he doesn't know where he is."
A soldier stopped us to ask for a lift. His name was Mir Ziahadin and he was excited, having been unable to sleep since taking part in the attack of the night before.
Sitting next to me in the car, he could not stop talking. "What do you think of my coat?" he asked, fingering a handsome green anorak. I told him it was very nice. "I took it off a dead Arab soldier," he said. "He was lying wounded in a trench when I found him. So I shot him - I took his jacket off first."
I asked whether the Arab had asked for mercy. Ziahadin thought for a moment: "I didn't understand what he was saying, but I understood he was asking for mercy."
So why did you kill him? "Because he was a foreigner," said Ziahadin. "If he was an Afghan, even if he was Taliban, I would not kill him. Now the war will be over and we must live together again."
This is as much of an explanation as you need to see why, when the front line crumbled during a fierce battle on Monday night, most Taliban fled.
In the mid-afternoon, the Northern Alliance army broke its promise to stay outside Kabul and units began to drive in. Soldiers armed with machine guns and anti-tank rockets drove through the streets, watched warily by the people. Many remember how many of these same units, then called the Mujahadin, entered the city in 1992 after the fall of the pro-Russian government.
A few days after they arrived, rival warlords began a civil war that left thousands dead and much of the city in ruins.
But the Northern Alliance insists this will not happen again. Interior Minister Yanos Kanuni arrived in the city and denied that the men with guns were from his army. He said those men were police officers sent in to keep order and had army uniforms only because there was a shortage of the police grey uniform.
Soldiers I talked to told a different story, happily admitting that they were from army units who had the night before been fighting.
Meanwhile, reports came in that the Taliban army units, most of which had escaped the attack of Monday, were regrouping to the south-east and south-west of the city. By evening, Northern Alliance tanks had arrived on the city outskirts.
There are problems ahead, the biggest being that there is no agreement about what kind of government should not be established in Kabul.
Nobody expected the Taliban to collapse, losing more than half of Afghanistan and most major cities in just four days, but for the moment everyone is relaxed and happy. The Taliban and its harsh lifestyle are gone and, for the moment at least, nobody is telling anybody what to do in liberated Kabul.