Time magazine has a very disturbing cover image this week, because the magazine thinks it has a very important point to make about the war in Afghanistan. Editor Richard Stengel decided to make the cover a photograph of an Afghan woman with a gaping hole where her nose used to be, where the Taliban had mutilated her.
But the pretense that putting the woman's picture on the cover is politically neutral is fake naivete, covering over a real and dangerous naivete. The headline on this non-political image is "What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan."
It is a gut-wrenching assertion of what's at stake in the Afghan war—except, as a photo caption, it is completely false. A correct and accurate caption would be "What Is Still Happening, Even Though We Are in Afghanistan."
-Scocca
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