Zabihullah Mujahid, the spokesman of the Islamic Emirate, has emphasized the importance of modern studies, saying that such studies are needed in society.

“Don’t oppose any studies. Sharia studies are a need of the society. Medics are needed in society. Engineering is needed in society. Science is the future of society. All studies are needed for our religion. If we were developed in the field of science, would Gaza people be this much oppressed?” Mujahid said during a speech at a religious school.

“We should be working to correct the people’s mindset. There should be a great focus on educational institutions. There should be a great focus on institutions promoting religion. There should be a great focus on media which can correct people’s mindset,” he said.

“After five or 10 years, you will then see the effects in the society. A fundamental and right change will happen in the society.”

The UN Special Representative for Afghanistan, Roza Otunbayeva, has said that the challenge of ensuring access to education for girls and women in the country is not one-dimensional and it requires dialogue at all levels.

Otunbayeva made the remarks at the two-day International Conference on Girls’ Education in Muslim Communities which ended on Sunday in Islamabad.

She also called on countries to offer scholarships and online education programs for Afghan girls.

In a declaration, conference participants said that obstructing girls from education constitutes societal bias against women and called on Muslims across the world to provide equal opportunities for girls' education.

It added that such actions represent a grave misuse of religious principles to legitimize policies of deprivation and exclusion.

Former Afghan president Hamid Karzai welcomed the declaration and once again called on the Islamic Emirate to reopen schools and universities to girls.

In a post on X, he stressed that the ban on girls’ education in Afghanistan “is against the national interests and the supreme interests of the country and is unjustifiable.”

US national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Sunday that President Joe Biden made the right strategic call to withdraw from Afghanistan three years ago and that history reflects well on that decision.

“The strategic call President Biden made, looking back three years, history has judged well and will continue to judge well,” Sullivan said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“From the point of view that, if we were still in Afghanistan today, Americans would be fighting and dying; Russia would have more leverage over us; we would be less able to respond to the major strategic challenges we face,” he said.

On the New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans, Sullivan said that while the investigation continues, the FBI has not found “any connection between Afghanistan and the attacker.”

“Now, the FBI will continue to look for foreign connections. Maybe we’ll find one, but what we’ve seen is proof of what President Biden said, which is that the terrorist threat has gotten more diffuse and more metastasized elsewhere, including homegrown extremists here in the United States who have committed terrorist attacks,” Sullivan said.

“Not just under President Biden, but under President Trump in his first term.”

“And that is part of why we had to move our focus from a hot war in Afghanistan to a larger counterterrorism effort across the world,” he added.

He went on to say, “the United States of America is definitively better off that we are not entering our 25th year of Americans fighting and dying in Afghanistan.”