‘So pervasive is the Taliban’s institutionalised gender oppression, and so slender are the spaces in which women and girls may live freely, that in Afghanistan today almost any act can be characterised as an act of resistance.”

That conclusion from Richard Bennett, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, encapsulates how unbearably suffocating it is to be female in Afghanistan today: excluded from education and from running a business; forbidden from going outside for a walk or to exercise, to speak or show any part of their face or body outside the home; or even for their voices to be heard singing or reading from within their own home. There is no other country where women and girls are so oppressed on the basis of their sex.

The US and the UK are complicit in this oppression. Their abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 triggered the collapse of the Afghan government under which the situation for women and girls was improving. This paved the way for the........

© The Guardian