‘It is worse now’: The Bookseller of Kabul author Åsne Seierstad on returning to Afghanistan 20 years on

The Norwegian writer on meeting the Taliban, her fears for girls’ education, and the legal battle that ensued after the publication of her bestselling book

The author Åsne Seierstad’s cool, shaded garden, within walking distance from the centre of Oslo, seems a very long way from Afghanistan and the Taliban. But sitting there, drinking tea, she brings a vivid sense of that other dustier, more chaotic world alive.

That relationship began for Seierstad two weeks after 9/11, when, as a freelance foreign correspondent, she embedded herself with the Northern Alliance of forces that, with western support, would sweep the Islamic fundamentalist regime from power. Twenty years later, she has been among the few journalists to go back after the desperate airlift that ended US and British support for democratic government and to spend time bearing witness to the Taliban’s chilling return to power.

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