Maroofi notes that there are some kinks to work out: Currently, female members of the Afghan parliament are fearful of attending with their not-yet-public Taliban colleagues.
Her story would never have generated outrage or interest on the part of the public — or the Taliban.
In Swat, girls have had acid thrown in their faces for walking alone in public and the Taliban proudly videotape their brutalities and upload them to the internet.
In the struggle for the high ground of public opinion, the Taliban and the Pentagon traded accusations today over civilian deaths and combat losses.
It has also fortified a growing consensus among Pakistani politicians and the public that the Taliban have gone too far and that the military should act to contain the spread of the insurgency.
Women did not remove the long, all-concealing robes known as burkas -- they are the traditional attire of Afghanistan -- but a few did briefly expose their faces, an act that risked a public whipping under Taliban rule.
In late 2012, the Karzai government blocked investigations into how friends of the Karzai family turned the Afghan central bank into a Ponzi scheme, and resumed public hangings of Taliban fighters and criminals.
The reports — usually spare summaries but sometimes detailed narratives — shed light on some elements of the war that have been largely hidden from the public eye: The Taliban have used portable heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft, a fact that has not been publicly disclosed by the military.
By virtually all of the accounts I've heard, there is no single action the international community could insist upon that would have a greater impact on public opinion in Taliban country than the removal of A.W.K. and the replacement of his reign by a visibly more inclusive and less malign political economy.
According to senior sources in Kabul, after hearing of the death, a flustered President Ghani held a meeting with ministers and asked officers in his intelligence service: "If Mullah Omar is dead, who could take over?" Mullah Omar has not been seen in public since the Taliban regime's overthrow by American and British-led forces in 2001.
Last weekend Mr. Khan led a motor cavalcade of supporters to the edge of the tribal belt as part of a demonstration against American drone strikes in the area — a theme that, until now at least, has frequently been a more concentrated focus of public anger than Taliban violence.
