I'll answer first what my first priority would be. I would really like to see Canada reaching out to France, Germany and Sweden, and working together to step in and guide where feminist foreign policy should be taking global policy for all countries on Afghanistan.
It is worth mentioning how much consensus there is across countries about the fact that what the Taliban is doing on women's rights, and other human rights, is beyond the pale. We've seen condemnations over the school ban from the OIC, Turkey, and Qatar. Everyone agrees. What's missing is leadership, and I want those four countries to provide that.
In terms of your question about operating on the ground, we don't actually have anyone in country. We're having a very hard discussion about whether we can go or not, because the risk is not to us, but to the people we would talk to. We are very afraid that if we went and interviewed people, and did research in Afghanistan, the Taliban would retaliate against the people we spoke with, and we would have no ability at all to protect them. That is one of the constraints we are facing, more than the issue about being classified as a terrorist group.
That's a very hard thing to figure out. For the moment, we've been doing our research remotely in ways that still bring a lot of security challenges. We're seeing a lot of concerns about the monitoring of people's phones, social media, and so on. It definitely feels like there is a net tightening in some very frightening ways.