Afghan Women Dread Peace With Taliban

It appears increasingly likely that the US exit strategy from Afghanistan will involve some form of reconciliation with the Taliban. But that’s a terrifying thing for many Afghan women, Time reports this week, plastering on its cover the grisly image of an 18-year-old woman who had her nose and ears cut off by her husband on the orders of a Taliban judge. Her crime? Running away from an abusive husband.

“They are the people that did this to me,” she says. “How can we reconcile with them?” But Hamid Karzai seems ready to do just that. In a recent talk with Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch, Karzai wondered aloud if he could afford to worry about human rights in the face of the death and destruction brought by the war. “He essentially asked me,” Malinowski recalls, “What is more important, protecting the right of a girl to go to school, or saving her life?” (More Afghanistan exit strategy stories.)