Disfigured Afghan on Cover of Time Heads to US

(Aug. 5) -- A disfigured Afghan teen whose image has fast become the new face of the 9-year-old Afghan war -- and a harbinger of what could come if U.S. troops quit the country -- lands in America today for reconstructive surgery on her missing nose and ears.

Doctors in California will try to rebuild 18-year-old Bibi Aisha's face, disfigured in an act condoned by the Taliban after she tried to flee abuse from her in-laws. But a controversy is already swirling over Aisha's photo [Warning: graphic content on this and other links] on the cover of Time magazine, and what it says about Afghanistan's future.

The photo depicts Aisha with her headscarf pulled back, baring her face with a gaping, heart-shaped hole where her nose should be. Her pose is reminiscent of the portrait of another Afghan woman, Sharbat Ghul, whose piercing green eyes were on the cover of National Geographic in 1985. Aisha's maimed face suggests a comparison with Afghanistan then and now.

"This didn't happen 10 years ago, when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan. It happened last year," the Time article detailing Aisha's disfigurement reads. Its headline says, "What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan." Without a question mark, it's a bold assertion of what's at stake if NATO forces abandon Afghanistan and the Taliban once again takes over.

The cover and its story have been both praised and decried in the blogosphere. War critics have called it "war porn" and exploitative of Aisha; others have called it a chilling call to conscience.

On her first appearance as host of ABC's "This Week" show, Christiane Amanpour thrust the Time cover at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asking her, "Is America going to abandon the women of Afghanistan?"

The publication comes at a time when the number of Americans who now believe it was a mistake to send troops to Afghanistan is at its highest point since the war began in 2001. A new Gallup poll shows 43 percent of Americans oppose the mission there.

Part of the controversy has also been Time's willingness to publish such a graphic image.

"I'm acutely aware that this image will be seen by children, who will undoubtedly find it distressing. We have consulted with a number of child psychologists about its potential impact," Managing Editor Richard Stengel wrote in a commentary. "But bad things do happen to people, and it is part of our job to confront and explain them."

Ironically, Aisha herself had never heard of Time magazine before a visitor brought a copy of this week's issue to her at a women's shelter in a secret location in Kabul. She was unaware of the controversy surrounding the magazine's publication. She agreed to the photo shoot to raise awareness of the Taliban's brutal tactics, the magazine said.

"I don't know if it will help other women or not," she told The New York Times. "I just want to get my nose back."

When she was 12, Aisha and her younger sister were given to the family of a Taliban fighter in Afghanistan's Oruzgan province as a tribal peace offering, after Aisha's uncle killed a relative of her future husband. She was married at age 16, but she and her sister were housed with her in-laws' livestock and treated as slaves. She escaped, but her husband tracked her down in Kandahar last year. Her brother-in-law held her down, while her husband sliced off her ears, then her nose.

"When they cut off my nose and ears, I passed out," Aisha told CNN, describing the attack. "It felt like there was cold water in my nose. I opened my eyes, and I couldn't even see because of all the blood."

According to a Pashtun tribal saying, a husband who's been shamed by his wife is said to have lost his nose, and Aisha's husband probably believed her punishment was appropriate, Manizha Naderi, an Afghan-American aid worker, told the Times. Naderi's group, Women for Afghan Women, runs the Kabul shelter that's housed Aisha for the past year, and is also helping to fund her reconstructive surgery, along with Time and the Grossman Burn Foundation.

Aisha left Kabul for the U.S. on Wednesday, and told the Times she still hoped to phone her family, despite her abuse, to tell them about her trip.

She leaves behind a home country where the U.N. estimates that nearly 90 percent of women face some sort of domestic abuse. There are fewer than a dozen women's shelters in all of Afghanistan, and a popular TV channel in Kabul has been running unsourced reports alleging that all of them are fronts for prostitution.

President Hamid Karzai has convened a panel to investigate complaints against the shelters, but appointed as its chairman a conservative mullah who has also perpetuated the prostitution rumor.

Aisha also left behind in Afghanistan her 10-year-old sister, who is believed to still be with the in-laws and may be facing similar abuse.