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Afghan youth rights activist Wazhma Sayle says she was shocked to see a photograph online, apparently of women dressed in black all-enveloping niqabs and gowns, staging a demonstration in support of the country's new Taliban rulers at Kabul University.

The 36-year-old, who is based in Sweden, later posted a photograph of herself on Twitter dressed in a bright green and silver dress captioned: "This is Afghan culture & how we dress! Anything less then this does not represent Afghan women!"

"It's a fight for our identity," Sayle said in a telephone interview. "I don't want to be identified the way Taliban showed me, I cannot tolerate that. These clothes, when I wear them, speak for where I come from."

Other Afghan women overseas have posted similar pictures, striking a chord in Kabul.

"At least they are able to tell the world that we, the women of Afghanistan, do not support the Taliban," said Fatima, a 22-year-old in the Afghan capital. "I cannot post such pictures or wear those kind of clothes here anymore. If I did, the Taliban would kill me."

Many women said they believed the purported protest, which has appeared on social media and in Western media, was staged and that several people dressed in the head-to-toe black burqa gowns were men. Reuters has not verified the authenticity of the pictures.

"It is good our women (overseas) were able to protest about it," said Khatima, another young woman in Kabul. "The reality is, the burqa is not representative of women in Afghanistan."

When the Taliban was in power two decades ago, women had to cover themselves from head to toe. Those who broke the rules sometimes suffered humiliation and public beatings by the Taliban's religious police.

While the new Taliban regime has promised to allow women more freedoms, there have been reports of women being barred from going to work, and some being beaten in recent weeks for protesting Taliban rule.

Universities have installed curtains inside classrooms to segregate men and women.

The online campaign with hashtags such as #DoNotTouchMyClothes and #AfghanistanCulture began when U.S.-based Afghan historian Bahar Jalali tweeted to criticise the black garments worn by the university demonstrators.

"No woman has ever dressed like this in the history of Afghanistan. This is utterly foreign and alien to Afghan culture," she said. 

Jalali then posted a photograph of herself in a green dress with the caption, "This is Afghan culture," and urged others to post too. Dozens of women did.

"We don’t want the Taliban to dictate what Afghan women are," said Lema Afzal, a 25-year-old Afghan student in Belgium.

Afzal, born in Afghanistan under the first Taliban rule that lasted from 1996 to 2001, said she was horrified when she saw the picture of the black-clad demonstrators.

Her mother had worn the long blue burqa gowns forced upon women at the time and found it hard to breathe or see from under them, she said.

"The picture made me worried that history is repeating itself. My mom’s family didn’t cover their heads at all in the 70s and 80s, when it was fancy to be wearing mini skirts in Afghanistan." (Reuters)

The foreign ministers of South Korea and China held talks in Seoul on Wednesday amid concerns over North Korea's recent missile test and stalled denuclearisation negotiations between Pyongyang and Washington.

The meeting came days after North Korea said it successfully tested a new, strategic long-range cruise missile last weekend, which analysts say could be the country's first such weapon with a nuclear capability. 

The test underscored steady progress in Pyongyang's weapons programme amid a deadlock over talks aimed at dismantling the North's nuclear and ballistic missile programmes in return for U.S. sanctions relief.

South Korea's Chung Eui-yong met Wang Yi, who is also a state councillor, on the second day of a two-day visit, Seoul's foreign ministry said.

Chung vowed to continue fostering peace with the North, expressing hopes that the upcoming Winter Olympics in Beijing could provide a chance to kick-start that effort.

"We expect China will consistently support our government's Korea peninsula peace process," he told Wang at the start of the talks.

"We wish that the Northeast Asia relay of the Olympics, from Pyeongchang in 2018 to Tokyo in 2021 to Beijing in 2022, will be held successfully as an epidemic-free, safe and peaceful Games."

Wang asked for further cooperation to expand common interests and "more quickly, stably and fully" strengthen diplomatic ties which mark their 30th anniversary next year.

Both sides held a separate meeting to map out steps to boost cultural exchanges, which have been scaled back in recent years amid China's backlash over a U.S. missile defence system installed in South Korea.

Seoul and Washington say the equipment is designed to counter North Korean missiles, but Beijing argues the system's powerful radar can penetrate into its territory.

On Tuesday, the chief nuclear negotiators of South Korea, the United States and Japan met in Tokyo, during which they agreed on the urgent need for dialogue and diplomacy to resume denuclearisation talks, according to South Korea's foreign ministry. 

The U.S. envoy, Sung Kim, said during the meeting that Washington has no hostile intent toward Pyongyang and hopes it will respond to offers for talks.

China, North Korea's sole major ally, has played a key role in efforts to press it to dismantle its nuclear programmes. (Reuters)

A month after seizing Kabul, the Taliban face daunting problems as they seek to convert their lightning military victory into a durable peacetime government.

After four decades of war and the deaths of tens of thousands of people, security has largely improved, but Afghanistan's economy is in ruins despite hundreds of billions of dollars in development spending over the past 20 years.

Drought and famine are driving thousands from the country to the cities, and the World Food Programme fears food could run out by the end of the month, pushing up to 14 million people to the brink of starvation.

While much attention in the West has focused on whether the new Taliban government will keep its promises to protect women's rights or offer shelter to militant groups like al Qaeda, for many Afghans the main priority is simple survival.

"Every Afghan, kids, they are hungry, they don't have a single bag of flour or cooking oil," said Kabul resident Abdullah.

Long lines still form outside banks, where weekly withdrawal limits of $200 or 20,000 afghani have been imposed to protect the country's dwindling reserves.

Impromptu markets where people sell household goods for cash have sprung up across Kabul, although buyers are in short supply.

Even with billions of dollars in foreign aid, Afghanistan's economy had been struggling, with growth failing to keep pace with the steady increase in population. Jobs are scarce and many government workers have been unpaid since at least July.

While most people appear to have welcomed the end of fighting, any relief has been tempered by the near-shutdown of the economy.

"Security is quite good at the moment but we aren't earning anything," said a butcher from the Bibi Mahro area of Kabul, who declined to give his name. "Every day, things get worse for us, more bitter. It's a really bad situation."

AID FLIGHTS

Following the chaotic foreign evacuation of Kabul last month, the first aid flights have started to arrive as the airport reopens.

International donors have pledged over $1 billion to prevent what United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned could be "the collapse of an entire country."

But world reaction to the government of Taliban veterans and hardliners announced last week has been cool, and there has been no sign of international recognition or moves to unblock more than $9 billion in foreign reserves held outside Afghanistan.

Although Taliban officials have said they do not intend a repeat of the harsh fundamentalist rule of the previous government, toppled by a U.S.-led campaign following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, they have struggled to convince the outside world that they have really changed.

Widespread reports of civilians being killed and journalists and others being beaten, and doubts about whether the rights of women really will be respected under the Taliban's interpretation of Islamic law, have undermined confidence.

In addition, there has been deep mistrust of senior government figures like the new interior minister Sirajuddin Haqqani, designated by the United States as a global terrorist with a $10 million bounty on his head.

To make matters worse for the Taliban, the movement has had to fight speculation over deep internal splits in its own ranks, denying rumours that Deputy Prime Minister Abdul Ghani Baradar had been killed in a shootout with Haqqani supporters.

Officials say the government is working to get services up and running again and that the streets are now safe, but as the war recedes, resolving the economic crisis is looming as a bigger problem.

"Thefts have disappeared. But bread has also disappeared," said one shopkeeper. (Reuters)

Taiwanese fighter jets landed on a makeshift runway on a highway strip on Wednesday overseen by President Tsai Ing-wen as annual drills reached their peak, skills that would be needed in the event China attacks and targets Taiwan's vulnerable air bases.

China has been ramping up its military pressure against the island it claims as "sacred" Chinese territory, hoping to force the democratically elected government to accept Beijing's sovereignty, including with repeated exercises near Taiwan.

Tsai, re-elected by a landslide last year on a pledge to stand up to China, has made modernising Taiwan's mainly U.S.-equipped military a priority, turning it into a "porcupine", both highly mobile and hard to attack.

Three fighters - an F-16, French-made Mirage and a Ching-kuo Indigenous Defence Fighter - plus an E-2 Hawkeye early warning aircraft landed in rural southern Pingtung county on a highway strip specially designed to be straight and flat for rapid conversion from a road into a runway.

"Such splendid combat skills and rapid and real actions come from solid everyday training and also demonstrate the confidence of the Republic of China Air Force in defending its airspace," Tsai wrote on Facebook, referencing Taiwan's formal name.

Taiwan has five emergency highway runways across the island which can be pressed into service in the event a Chinese attack takes out air force bases, meaning the air force will still be able to operate.

The majority of Taiwan's air bases are on its flat west coast, facing China, and would likely come under almost immediate heavy missile and aerial bombardment in case of war.

Taiwan's mountainous east coast is home to two other air bases, with hangers hewn deep into the rock, providing much more solid protection.

The week-long Han Kuang drills are taking place around Taiwan, with other exercises to practise repelling a Chinese invasion, protecting critical infrastructure and night operations, though the highway drills are the most dramatic.

Taiwan's air force scrambles on an almost daily basis to intercept Chinese aircraft that fly into the island's air defence zone, mostly close to the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Islands at the top part of the South China Sea. (Reuters)