India, June 28 -- In an essay written years ago, I rhetorically claimed that certain illnesses do not get enough resources because they are gender-specific - women dying or ailing, because of endometriosis for example, do not matter; sexually insecure men do. In a different setting, this still stands true. If the Taliban behaved with men the way they do with women, all eyes would be on Afghanistan. Today, they stand normalised. The story has moved on. The wreckage of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 keeps washing ashore, shards that refuse to settle in the depths of anonymity and indifference. They continue to prick. Like, a desolate email from an Afghan student to her professors in India. Or the video of a burqa-clad woman being whipped by a man for the crime of teaching girls in her house. Rising on the promise of peace, the Taliban has systematically erased women from the book of what-the-world-cares-for-and-acts-against. A UK-based journalist of Afghan origin, Yalda Hakim, has been keeping a count of days on her X timeline. As of today, "Day 1,743 of Afghan women being deniedthe right to an education. 2.2 million women and girls have been affected and the world remains silent." As a matter of fact, the world, specifically the'enlightened' West, is actively trying to send refugees back. It knows what awaits them yet chooses not to care. The latest EU-Taliban closed-door talks in Brussels is just another demonstration in the long history of apathy towards the victims of the Taliban. Domestic politics in Europe has succeeded in normalising the woman-hating Afghan government with this maiden invitation to Taliban officials. With a rising tide of hostilities against immigrants, European countries are keen to push them back into contexts that led to their immigration in the first place. It has become de rigeuer to accuse immigrants of seeking greener pastures in the West after allegedly destroying their own yard. Such criticism falls flat in the face of facts. In case of Afghanistan, the largest number of refugees - almost 90% of the total - are there in the neighbouring countries Iran and Pakistan. Underconstant threat of violence and deportation, these refugees live underpitiable conditions, braving everyday insults as the necessary price to pay for displacement. Cusswords are better than public hangings. Iran alone deported about 1.5 million Afghans in 2025. So, if greener pastures mean bare survival, Afghan refugees are guilty. But, let us talk about women. The US waged a war against Iran this year on the pretext of ensuring women's rights by overthrowing the Ayatollah government. It is only when the heat became too much to bear for Europe that it started critiquing the US-Israel adventurism. A similar war was waged by the US against Afghanistan decades ago. It has ended up condemning Afghan women further by rendering them vulnerable to an empowered, emboldened, and now acceptedTaliban. In the past five years, women have been punished for asking not to be treated as chattels. Taliban's crackdown on women's education, health, and any other marker of agency has evidenced a kind of vengeance that's not uncommon but rarely unresisted. Establishing relations with a government in the name of pragmatism may be a necessity that will weigh heavy on any establishment's conscience. By treating the Taliban as the true sons of the Afghan soil, most countries, including India, have condemned the daughters of the same soil to torture and hopelessness. Internal matters of a country are best left to the people of that country. But what happens when an apartheid regime doesn't allow half the population to even breathe? Modern diplomacy doesn't care, not should it, for moral absolutism. What, then, is the way forward for at least three generations of women languishing under the oppressive and discriminatory rule of the Taliban? At this moment, Europe has a lot of soul searching to do. And so does everyone who has moved on from the story....