Time magazine's stark cover story

This is 18 year-old Aisha, mutilated by the the Taliban for fleeing an abusive marriage. "What happens if we leave Afghanistan" does rather beg the question: If this is still going on after nine years of occupation and uncounted billions of development aid, why remain?

Managing Editor Richard Stengel, in a departure from the Time norm, wrote an editorial to explain the story behind the ghastly image, balancing considerations of Aisha's safety and how children seeing the cover will react against the need to tell it like it is in images as well as words.

In the end, I felt that the image is a window into the reality of what is happening - and what can happen - in a war that affects and involves all of us. I would rather confront readers with the Taliban's treatment of women than ignore it. I would rather people know that reality as they make up their minds about what the U.S. and its allies should do in Afghanistan. 

There does not seem to be any doubt that the US-led coalition of the increasingly unwilling is now at war with the Pashtun people (see the eloquent maps here). These are the dreaded "Pathans" of Raj frontier warfare, who fit the absolute social nadir described by Hobbes perfectly:

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

So the answer to Time magazine's ambiguous cover question-statement is that we are going to leave, the puppets we have propped up and the native security forces we have trained are going to be killed if they do not change sides or flee opportunely, and Afghan women will continue to be brutalized by viciously misogynist male homosexuals who want nothing to do with modernity and whose sole attribute is outstanding personal courage.