‘I was very concerned about the exploitation of that personal family tragedy in order to make a case for keeping American troops in Afghanistan and continuing this war, in which so many Afghans have suffered’

Remember Aisha? The poster girl of how great our invasion of Afghanistan has been. The girl who has her ears and nose cut off by the Taliban (or not)? Immortalized on the front cover of Time, in a photo by Jodie Bieber, with the accompanying headline ‘What happens if we leave Afghanistan’.

Here’s an excerpt from an interesting interview with the journalist Ann Jones who also interviewed Aisha several weeks before Time got there. Amazing how her story changed …

ANN JONES: I was very concerned about the exploitation of that personal family tragedy in order to make a case for keeping American troops in Afghanistan and continuing this war, in which so many Afghans have suffered. Bibi Aisha’s case was not uncommon. Her particular mutilation has been her nose and ears being cut off. There are four cases of it reported this year by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. This, after Americans have been protecting Afghan women for eight or nine years in Afghanistan. This happens to be the way some Pashtun families treat women in order to keep them in servitude to the family. We are not going to change that by the presence of troops, and we’re not going to stop it by the presence of troops.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us her story, though, and how you feel it was misrepresented, in being on the cover, Time’s case for why the US is there?

ANN JONES: Mm-hmm. Bibi Aisha ran away from her parents-in-law’s house. Her husband was absent elsewhere in doing some kind of work or looking for work. She was treated as a servant and physically abused all the time. She ran away. Her father-in-law caught up with her and did this mutilation. The Time story amplifies that, saying it was done under orders by Taliban commanders and so on. That is not the story I heard from Bibi Aisha when I talked with her. But—

JUAN GONZALEZ: And you spoke to her before this Time story had ever come out.

ANN JONES: I spoke to her several weeks before, and other journalists have spoken to her, as well, and have reported the mutilation, but not this supposed instruction of the Taliban to do this. So I think the story changed in some way. How that happened, I don’t know. This young woman was deeply traumatized, and we know that people in that circumstance have selective memory or repressed memory, and maybe it changed later. I don’t know. But my quarrel is with the news media that took that personal tragedy and used it for this political manipulation. And even the story in that issue of Time about what’s going on in Afghanistan today was much more nuanced and was warning against the possibility of women being sold out in negotiations with the Taliban. That is a very real concern that we need to be addressing, and that was completely ignored in the attention paid to this particular horrifying photo.

Read the full interview here on Democracy Now. Its enlightening.