WASHINGTON - July 30 - The new Time magazine cover featuring a young Afghan woman with her nose missing and the headline "What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan?" has been challenged by many critics, including:

* FAIR -- "Time Magazine: We Cannot Leave Afghanistan"

* Greg Mitchell -- "What ALSO Happens If We Leave Afghanistan"

* Feminist Peace Network -- "Time Magazine Once Again Trots Out the Tired and Inexcusable 'We're in Afghanistan (and Have to Stay) to Protect Women' Mantra"

The following, who have focused on Afghan women, are available for interviews:


NAHID AZIZ [currently in France]
Available for a limited number of interviews, Aziz is an Afghan woman who is a professor of clinical psychology at Argosy University in Washington, D.C. She is also vice president of the group Afghan Education for a Better Tomorrow.

She has written several pieces on Afghan women for Psychologists for Social Responsibility.


SONALI KOLHATKAR
Kolhatkar is co-author of the book Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence. She is also co-director of the Afghan Women's Mission, a U.S.-based nonprofit that supports women's rights activists in Afghanistan.

She said today: "This is the same type of justification that the Soviets used (among others) to explain why they should remain in Afghanistan: to save Afghan women from the 'backward' fundamentalists. Foreign armies have always sought to protect Afghan women from violence by fomenting violence themselves. But in the end, just like the Soviets did backroom deals with radical misogynist groups, the U.S. has been empowering non-Taliban misogynist fundamentalists since the start of this war. There are incidents happening every day in Afghanistan of women and girls being harassed, raped, flogged and killed by pro-U.S. warlords and local commanders that are not working with the Taliban -- these incidents are rarely covered by the Western media. In many ways the U.S. occupation has actually made things worse for Afghan women. Afghan women activists I work with prefer to resist two threats to their security (the Taliban and the U.S.-backed central government) instead of three (the third being the U.S./NATO occupation) and have long called for U.S. forces to leave. Time magazine is playing to age-old racist stereotypes: that brown women need a foreign white army to save them from their men."