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Our cover image this week is powerful, shocking and disturbing. It is a portrait of Aisha, a shy 18-year-old Afghan woman who was sentenced by a Taliban commander to have her nose and ears cut off for fleeing her abusive in-laws. Aisha posed for the picture and says 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. Her picture is accompanied by a powerful story on how Afghan women have embraced the freedoms that have come from the defeat of the Taliban — and how they fear a Taliban revival.

I thought long and hard about whether to put this image on the cover of TIME. First, I wanted to make sure of Aisha's safety and that she understood what it would mean to be on the cover. She knows that she will become a symbol of the price Afghan women have had to pay for the repressive ideology of the Taliban. We also confirmed that she is in a secret location protected by armed guards and sponsored by the NGO Women for Afghan Women. Aisha will head to the U.S. for reconstructive surgery sponsored by the Grossman Burn Foundation, a humanitarian organization in California. We are supporting that effort.

I'm acutely aware that this image will be seen by children, who will undoubtedly find it distressing. I apologize to readers who find the image too strong, and I invite you to comment on the image's impact.

But bad things do happen to people, and it is part of our job to confront and explain them. 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.

We do not run this story or show this image either in support of the U.S. war effort or in opposition to it. We do it to illuminate what is actually happening on the ground. As lawmakers and citizens begin to sort through the Wikileaks information about the war and make up their minds, our job is to provide context and perspective on one of the most difficult foreign policy issues of our time. What you see in these pictures and our story is something that you cannot find in those 91,000 documents: a combination of emotional truth and insight into the way life is lived in that difficult land and the consequences of the important decisions that lie ahead.

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The Taliban pounded on the door just before midnight, demanding that Aisha, 18, be punished for running away from her husband's house. They dragged her to a mountain clearing near her village in the southern Afghan province of Uruzgan, ignoring her protests that her in-laws had been abusive, that she had no choice but to escape. Shivering in the cold air and blinded by the flashlights trained on her by her husband's family, she faced her spouse and accuser. 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. Later, he would tell Aisha's uncle that she had to be made an example of lest other girls in the village try to do the same thing. The commander gave his verdict, and men moved in to deliver the punishment. 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. Aisha passed out from the pain but awoke soon after, choking on her own blood. The men had left her on the mountainside to die.

This didn't happen 10 years ago, when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan. It happened last year. Now hidden in a secret women's shelter in the relative safety of Kabul, where she was taken after receiving care from U.S. forces, Aisha recounts her tale in a monotone, her eyes flat and distant. She listens obsessively to the news on a small radio that she keeps by her side. Talk that the Afghan government is considering some kind of political accommodation with the Taliban is the only thing that elicits an emotional response. "They are the people that did this to me," she says, touching the jagged bridge of scarred flesh and bone that frames the gaping hole in an otherwise beautiful face. "How can we reconcile with them?"

That is exactly what the Afghan government plans to do. In June, President Hamid Karzai established a peace council tasked with exploring negotiations with Afghanistan's "upset brothers," as he calls the Taliban. A month later, Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, a New York — based NGO, flew to Kabul seeking assurances that human rights would be protected in the course of negotiations. During their conversation, Karzai mused on the cost of the conflict in human lives and wondered aloud if he had any right to talk about human rights when so many were dying. "He essentially asked me," says Malinowski, "What is more important, protecting the right of a girl to go to school or saving her life?" How Karzai and his international allies answer that question will have far-reaching consequences. Aisha has no doubt. "The Taliban are not good people," she says. "If they come back, the situation will be worse for everyone." But for others, the rights of Afghan women are only one aspect of a complex situation. How that situation will eventually be ordered remains unclear.

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Fawzia Koofi
The former deputy speaker of parliament, Koofi is very outspoken on women's issues. "Reconciliation will not bring peace to Afghanistan," she says. "Peace is a result of democracy. You have to include everyone in that process, including women." She is running for a second term in parliament but fears that new election rules may make it more difficult to succeed and that outspoken women like her will be sidelined.


Robina Muqimyar Jalalai
In 2004, Muqimyar was one of Afghanistan's first two female representatives at the Olympics. She is now running for parliament


Sabrina Saqib
Saqib, Afghanistan's youngest parliamentarian, says having women in parliament was a huge step forward. "Women came back to life after the Taliban."


Mozhdah Jamalzadah
Part Oprah, part Hannah Montana, The Mozhdah Show, hosted by Jamalzadah, is the latest sensation to hit Afghanistan's television screens.


Mahbooba Seraj
Women gather at a training conference for parliamentarians. "Women have just as much a right to take part in leading Afghanistan now as they did then," says Seraj, standing, referring to historical female heroes in Afghanistan. "We must not compare women in Afghanistan to women in France or Sweden. We have to compare women now to women in 2001. And we have made huge progress."


Sakina
When Sakina was 14, her family sold her into marriage with a 45-year-old man who had a carpet-weaving business. "I didn't know about marriage," she says. "I didn't know about relations between men and women." He used her as an indentured servant and beat her with weaving tools when she didn't work fast enough. Once, when she dropped some tea glasses, the family cut off all of her hair. She ran away. Now she is trying to get a divorce, which her in-laws refuse to grant because, they say, they paid good money for her.


Islam
Family conflict and a husband addicted to drugs pushed Islam to pour diesel fuel over herself in a suicide attempt. Her mother-in-law tried to extinguish the flames.


Prisoners
Nasimgul, left, and Gul Bahar, holding another inmate's child, are serving time in the Afghan women's detention center in Kabul. Even under the new government, Afghan society still imprisons women for crimes that are never ascribed to men, like running away and adultery, further stunting women's progress.


Shirin Gul
Convicted of murder and hijacking, Gul says she fell into a life of crime under pressure from her husband; she had six children, so she followed his wishes.


The Abadini Family
Though Afghan women are no longer required to wear burqas, as they were under Taliban rule, many women still wear them out of tradition or fear. The younger generation of Afghan women want more liberal and open ways of living in Afghan society.

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to stand up for themselves, or the protectors/rescuers will have to be there forever.

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Second, use trade as an inducement to change. If we could get out of those stupid so-called "free trade" agreements, or (better yet) convert those agreements to impose tariffs on nations without UN-approved elections, and with low literacy rates and legal inequities, then the overlords of those societies (who typically skim trade and aid) will see a pocketbook benefit to improving life in their nations.

But those make too much sense, and they ding the pocketbooks of the military industrial complex and the corporations which get cheap commodities and labor from slave-like conditions, so of course that will never happen.

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This might work if, at some point, the Taliban or some other fundamentalist male-domination outfit didn't decide you were messing with their prerogatives and put you down, along with anyone you'd 'contaminated' with your ideas. These guys don't really want an enlightenment or strength for the women - or pretty much anyone who's not them - in their world. It's been shown pretty conclusively that they'll use just about any means to keep things the way they like them.

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If you want, I can start new threads about all the genocides that are going on in the world right now. Won't that be cheery?

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