Not long ago, I came across a claim that travels widely online: that Afghan women were granted the right to vote in 1919, before women in the United States, France, Italy, and Switzerland. I understand why people share it. It pushes back against a false and damaging picture of Afghan women as people who have never had a public life, a political voice, or a place in their country's story. But history is not made more honorable by making it simpler. The more I looked...

On this Memorial Day, we remember every soldier, every civilian, every mother and child whose life was taken by war — American, Afghan, and all those whose names history forgets. We honor the fallen most truly when we refuse to let their sacrifice be in vain...

I could not sleep last night, and I will not pretend otherwise. This morning The Times of London printed a sentence that should have stopped the world: "Taliban legalise child marriage for girls as young as nine." The decree — thirty-one articles signed by the Taliban supreme leader and published in the official gazette this month — removes any minimum age for the marriage of girls and declares that the silence of a virgin girl is to be treated as her consent...

To my sisters in Iran and Afghanistan— I write to you tonight not as a distant observer, but as one whose heart beats with yours. If I could, I would sit beside each of you tonight—on rooftops in Tehran, in courtyards in Herat, in dimly lit rooms in Kabul where the curtains stay half‑closed—and place your tired hands between my own. I would say, before anything else: you are not alone, and you have never been forgotten. I know that some days the weight is unbearable: the clo