Having denied Afghan women jobs, education and free movement, ordered them to be totally covered, banned them from parks, removed their critical healthcare and silenced them with a ban on audible speech, the Taliban have plainly reached the point where the joy of torturing half the population has to be balanced, like any sensible exercise in mass persecution, with the needs and enjoyment of the male and free.

What, for example, to do about windows? Doubly enraging to the ruling obsessives, in that they offer female slaves the pleasure of daylight as well as allowing non-residents occasional evidence of their existence, these openings do, on the other hand, benefit the women’s male owners and their sons.

To immure or not to immure? Solomon-like, the Taliban’s supreme leader has now banned windows only on walls that overlook areas where women are still, by domestic necessity, allowed outside. Until such time as Afghan women can be kept – for sex, breeding and housework – perpetually underground, the latest edict stipulates that new buildings should not have windows from which “the courtyard, kitchen, neighbour’s well and other places usually used by women” are visible.

Last week the Taliban government’s spokesman confirmed on X that, to men like himself, even a fully covered woman with, say, an erect mop, is a sexual stimulus too far. “Seeing women working in kitchens, in courtyards or collecting water from wells can lead to obscene acts.”

If, as occasionally seems the case, the Taliban do consider opinion in the outside world, they appear again to have been correct in thinking that a further inventively........

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