BACK TO BARBARITY
In August 2010, Time magazine ran a cover photo of Aisha, an 18-year-old Afghan. Aisha was no longer pretty in the conventional sense because there was a hole where her nose had been. The Taliban hacked it off, along with her ears, as punishment for running away from abusive in-laws.
Inside, the magazine posed the question: “What happens if we leave Afghanistan?” The question was both incorrectly framed – even then it was clearly a matter of when, not if, the US and its Western allies would walk away – and redundant, since the photo provided the answer.
