Is The War In Afghanistan Good For Women?

All week, I've been discussing how remarkable it is that these WikiLeaks disclosures resulted in a stunning and hitherto unvoiced consensus from the media that the "conventional wisdom" is that the War in Afghanistan is not going well -- and that hearing about it all over again in the form of a document dump from Julian Assange was "nothing new." Now, we've come to the end of the week, and Time magazine has a graphic cover depicting a woman named Aisha who was maimed by the Taliban, along with the tagline, "What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan." Just when everyone was beginning to ask, "What is going to happen if we stay much longer?" (As Glenn Greenwald pointed out, there may already be an answer to that question.)

Obviously, the Taliban are a disaster for women and a blight on the face of human civilization. But this cover story, by its own admission, concerns itself with what we are doing there, what we hope to accomplish.

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