"As a winter chill deepens across Afghanistan, the Taliban appears to be imposing political conditions to match. Prominent women’s rights activists have been targeted for threats, beatings and abductions, including two — Tamana Paryani and Parwana Ibrahimkhil — who were taken by armed men from their Kabul homes on Jan. 19 and have not been heard from since. The United Nations’ human rights agency has called their disappearances part of a larger pattern of arbitrary arrests, detentions, torture and ill-treatment targeting civil society activists, journalists and media workers, as well as former officials of the U.S.-backed government and army."