by Conor Gannon
Earlier today the managing editor of Time, Richard Stengel, proleptically announced the cover to this week’s issue, at right. The woman is Aisha, and she lost her nose and ears at the hands of her husband; her crime was flight from his abuse. Fearing the outrage that has previously met photojournalists who choose not to intervene, Stengel informs us that Aisha is now “in a secret location protected by armed guards and sponsored by the NGO Women for Afghan Women” and “will head to the U.S. for reconstructive surgery sponsored by the Grossman Burn Foundation” and funded by Time. First she will become “a window into the reality of what is happening” in Afghanistan and, however disingenuously Stengel claims neutral intentions, a symbol of the humanitarian and feminist case for prolonged military engagement: in a headline, ‘What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan.’
The full story is on newsstands and iPads, not online. But by the looks of the preview and its accompanying photo gallery Time is staking out opposition to the only viable pathway to peace in the short-term: negotiations with the Taliban that would allow them some place in a postwar Afghan society. As the feasibility of the war comes increasingly under question, Time‘s article has Aisha ask its opponents the hard question: “‘They are the people that did this to me,’ [Aisha] says, touching her damaged face. ‘How can we reconcile with them?’” No one can look Aisha in the eyes and deny the justice of her request. Still, there is considerable danger in metonymically representing a military campaign for territory as a cultural campaign for women, or one woman. As Matt Yglesias notes, transforming norms in Afghanistan is not on the United States’ agenda; the very fact that Aisha’s tragedy came eight years into the war proves to Jezebel it cannot be. Time‘s cover thus moves beyond neutrality towards the war, even beyond defense of it, to argue for more or less total war: the complete elimination of the Taliban from society. In recognition of the impossibility of such an end, those waging the war have come to ask the opposite question: “How can we not reconcile with them?”
Of course the fact that Time released their defense of the cover online far before the story indicates that for many the cover will be the story, not Aisha. On that point a feminist’s concern is less with Time‘s effect on children (though we are reassured to learn they consulted “a number of child pyschologists”: a plural number!) than its entrance into the long history of utilizing Muslim women’s appearance to motivate continued public support for war. It may be more consequence than coincidence that, in some parts of the West, Muslim women’s appearance has become the war.
