That's a picture of a woman named Nuria. She's in prison, with the son she gave birth to while there, in Kabul, Afghanistan, where the United States of America is wrapping up a great and mighty war for freedom. Or something. Who knows at this point. She committed a moral crime. That is, she asked for a divorce from her husband whom she was forced to marry. She wanted to marry another man, one she is in love with. That man is in prison now, too. Nuria says that, even though she was offered a chance to leave if she returned to her husband, she would rather serve out the rest of her sentence.
Two hundred women are in the fairly new prison, most for moral crimes. An activist for women in the nation says, "We have the appearance of everything, but when you dig in deep down below the surface nothing fundamentally has changed."
If the Rude Pundit remembers correctly, one of the ways that we were sold the war in Afghanistan was that it would liberate (or, more accurately, re-liberate) the women there from the punishing treatment imposed on them by the Taliban and others. It was a cause that even Laura Bush was behind (as were many of us who were supporting that cause even before 9/11).
Failing in that means that, on one of the most basic ways you can measure it, even the supposedly "good" war was a heartbreaking waste of life and money.
