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This August marks the one-year anniversary of the American military withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s swift return to power in Kabul. It has been an excruciating year for the war-torn nation, marked by economic collapse, famine, and drought. Yet much of the aid that Afghanistan used to depend on has been blocked by sanctions aimed at pressuring the Taliban into a less repressive rule. As a result, nearly half the country is at risk of going hungry. The journalist Rozina Ali travelled to Kabul in the spring and spent time with former clients and staff of the largest network of women’s shelters in the country, which shut down so as not to legitimatize the new régime. Ali joins the guest host Susan B. Glasser, who also reported from Afghanistan, in 2001 and 2002, on the other end of the American intervention, to discuss the lives of the vulnerable women she met and the dilemma of negotiating with the Taliban. “We have to think about the very real scenario here, and actually the very real fact that girls can’t go to school and women can’t go to jobs if they are starving,” she says.
