Why we can’t leave Afghanistan–yeah sure, we’ve achieved absolutely nothing, trashed the country and possibly put ourselves in more danger and lost too many of our own in the process as well, but don’t be so selfish as to believe that we can just leave, oh no, we have to stay and protect the poor, pitiful Afghan women (and yes that is the sound of sarcasm you hear dripping off those words). The new issue of Time has a but we must protect the Afghan women piece (complete with heart rending graphics) that begins with, 
The Taliban pounded on the door just before midnight, demanding that Aisha, 18, be punished for running away from her husband’s house. Her in-laws treated her like a slave, Aisha pleaded. They beat her. If she hadn’t run away, she would have died. Her judge, a local Taliban commander, was unmoved. Aisha’s brother-in-law held her down while her husband pulled out a knife. First he sliced off her ears. Then he started on her nose.
This didn’t happen 10 years ago, when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan. It happened last year.
Exactly, it happened years after we went into Afghanistan claiming we were going to protect Afghan women, which has worked out not so much. But that doesn’t stop the Time piece from concluding,
For Afghanistan’s women, an early withdrawal of international forces could be disastrous. An Afghan refugee who grew up in Canada, Mozhdah Jamalzadah recently returned home to launch an Oprah-style talk show in which she has been able to subtly introduce questions of women’s rights without provoking the ire of religious conservatives. On a recent episode, a male guest told a joke about a foreign human rights team in Afghanistan. In the cities, the team noticed that women walked six paces behind their husbands. But in rural Helmand, where the Taliban is strongest, they saw a woman six steps ahead. The foreigners rushed to congratulate the husband on his enlightenment — only to be told that he stuck his wife in front because they were walking through a minefield. As the audience roared with laughter, Jamalzadah reflected that it may take about 10 to 15 years before Afghan women can truly walk alongside men.
So there you have it, we’ll have to stay another ten or fifteen years so that women can achieve equality. Imagine instead of contributing to the violence in Afghanistan that further harms women, we were to provide humanitarian aid that improved the lives of Afghan women. Imagine if we had taken the billions of ‘reconstruction’ funds that are unaccounted for in Iraq and given that money to responsible organizations to actually rebuild and strengthen the social infrastructure of both countries. Oh wait, then we couldn’t use the women excuse to continue to fund the military industrial complex. Enough already, women are not an excuse for militarism and war.
