Afghanistan's Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi’s official visit to India has renewed interest in the Taliban, especially its views on Islam and gender. Many Indians were outraged when women journalists were not permitted to Muttaqi’s media conference held at the Afghan embassy in Delhi on 10 October.
The incident brought back memories of the uproar following the Taliban’s first press conference in September 1996 in Kabul after they captured the Afghan capital. They asked a Western journalist, who was a woman, to leave. This is documented in the US State Department Archive.
If memory serves correctly, however, it was not one but two women journalists that were asked to leave. One of them was Anita Pratap, then the CNN bureau chief in Delhi, who was covering the Taliban takeover of Kabul.
The incident began an examination of the group’s human rights practices. This embarrassed the then US President Bill Clinton’s administration which was projecting the Taliban as an “authentic Afghan group,” involved with other entities in the civil war.
American women's rights groups took a tough stand against the Taliban. With Clinton contesting the presidential election for a second term in November that year, his administration was compelled to criticise Taliban’s social policies, but it did not abandon or go after the group.
That came only after 9/11.