Bibi Aisha: Face of Afghan Culture Clash or ¨War Porn¨?

Is the disfigured face of the 19-year-old Bibi Aisha on the cover of Time magazine a symbol of what happens if the United States abandons Afghanistan, or the latest case of manipulative media ¨war porn¨? 

Ever since Time featured the Afghan teenager's face without a nose on the cover of its August 9 issue, a debate rages over whether the magazine was justified in doing so.

Bibi Aisha (bibi is an honorific; Aisha requested that her family name be withheld) cannot read or write; she said she had not even heard of Time until a visitor brought her a copy of last week's issue, the one with the cover picture of her face, the face with no nose. (Mercifully her cut-off ears were hidden from view.)

Credit: Time

This weekend, thanks to the efforts of the Grossman Burn Foundation, Aisha arrived in Los Angeles and will undergo reconstructive surgery to rebuild her face. The foundation will provide the surgery for free.

Critics of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan call the Time cover ¨emotional blackmail¨ and even ¨war porn.¨

¨Feminists have long argued that invoking the condition of women to justify occupation is a cynical ploy,¨  wrote Priyamvada Gopal in the British daily The Guardian, ¨and the Time cover already stands accused of it.¨

Michael Shaw asked, ¨Isn't this title applying emotional blackmail and exploiting gender politics to pitch for the status quo -- a continued U.S. military involvement?¨



Some, like Harvard journalism student Nerman Sadat, have even argued that hacking off a girl's ears and nose can be seen as right or wrong, depending on the cultural lens that frames your core values and how you see things.

¨But who is virtuous and who has committed vice is often difficult to judge,¨ Sadat wrote. ¨Was Aisha's husband who cut off Aisha's ears and nose, upon the Taliban commander's order, the one who acted morally by punishing his wife for dishonor? Or was Aisha's initial escape from her abusive in-laws, despite 'violating' the Pashtunwali tribal code, acting justly by defending her universal human rights?¨

¨In Afghanistan,¨ Sadat continued, ¨women are considered a source of pride and one of the pillars in the core values of zan (women), zar (wealth), and zamin (property) -- all of which have the power to incite blood feuds.¨

In one such family feud, at age 12, Aisha and her younger sister were given to the family of a Taliban fighter in Oruzgan province under a tribal custom for settling disputes, known as baad. Aisha's uncle had killed a relative of the groom to be, and to settle the blood debt her father gave the two girls to the victim's family.

Once Aisha reached puberty, she was married to the Taliban fighter. Since he was in hiding most of the time, the two sisters were housed with the in-laws' livestock, used as slaves, and often beaten as punishment for their uncle's crime.

(¨Her 10-year-old sister is still there, and we have no idea where she is,¨ said Manizha Naderi, the Afghan-American executive director of Women for Afghan Women, which runs the shelter where Aisha stayed. ¨They're probably taking all of their anger out on her now, or even demanding another girl from her family to replace Aisha.¨)

Aisha fled, but her husband tracked her down in Kandahar a year ago, took her back to Oruzgan, on a deserted mountainside cut off her nose and both ears, and left her on the ground bleeding.

In Pashtun culture, a husband who has been shamed by his wife is said to have lost his nose. So from the husband's point of view he was punishing Aisha in kind.

Others counter that there is no need to put oneself in the shoes of a Taliban warlord, quite the contrary: that Aisha's face is living proof why the Taliban should never be allowed to return to power.

¨Aisha posed for the picture and said she wants the world to see the effect a Taliban resurgence would have on the women of Afghanistan, many of whom have flourished in the past few years,¨ wrote Richard Stengel, Time's managing editor, in his editorial accompanying the August 9 issue.

What do you think? Is Aisha the victim of ¨emotional blackmail¨ and ¨war porn,¨ or the face of Taliban human rights abuses? Was Time justified in putting her badly disfigured face on its cover, with the caption ¨What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan¨ (without a question mark)? I look forward to reading your comments on my blog.

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