The taliban

Quiz. Which country had a successful court named the Court for the Elimination of Violence against Women, where women could seek redress for any perceived wrong? Was it the United Kingdom, this ancient democracy that operates according to the rule of law? Or Afghanistan, where we assume women have always had to wear hideous burqas, cannot work, go to school, play music or laugh out loud? It was Afghanistan between the two Taliban regimes (2001-21), when women could be employed and laugh and study, and when Afghanistan had a network of nearly 300 female judges, many of them sitting in that wonderfully named court and doing their best to make

Ahmed Shah Massoud was described as ‘the Afghan who won the Cold War’. While famous in France (he was educated at the Kabul lycée, and the French saw him as the ultimate maquisard who drove a super-power out of his country), he is not a familiar figure in Britain. This book, a rich and detailed account of the travails and tragedy of Afghanistan between 1976 and Massoud’s murder in 2001, will correct that. Sandy Gall’s knowledge of the jihad is encyclopaedic. He was the first well-known journalist to make the dangerous journey into occupied Afghanistan and bring the human cost of this terrible war to our TV screens. To produce