On Sunday, I woke up to the defiant presence of Indian women journalists confronting the Taliban foreign minister with head-on questions. “What are you doing, sir, in Afghanistan?” a woman journalist asked Amir Khan Muttaqi. “When will Afghan women and girls be allowed to go back and get their right to education?” Muttaqi smiled and said women’s education was not “haram”. But he offered no explanation for why, for four years, Afghan women and girls have been banned from school, university and most jobs.

That Sunday event was the second press conference the Taliban had held in New Delhi in two days. The first had invited only 16 male journalists. Women journalists were left off the list. After outrage, the Afghan embassy dismissed the exclusion as a “technical issue”, stating it had no p

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