by Eric Dondero

Time Magazine is running a shocking photo on its front cover for this week's edition. As the editors explain:

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 by our own Aryn Baker on how Afghan women have embraced the freedoms that have come from the defeat of the Taliban — and how they fear a Taliban revival.

The non-interventionist wing of the libertarian movement wants an immediate pull-out of Afghanistan. The Ron Paul movement, Lew Rockwell and his followers, Justin Raimondo and Eric Garris at AntiWar.com, most Libertarian Party members, even many at Reason and Cato, all ignore the human rights catastrophe that would undoubtably follow.

As Raimondo has explained:

This war in Afghanistan has no convincing rationale, and no one can explain it – its goals, or what “victory” means, except as a) a war of retribution against enemies who have long since fled the scene, or b) a means of surrounding the Iranians, and a pretext for extending US influence into Central Asia.

Human Rights does not fit the leftwing libertarian template. It's an inconvenience to their carefully crafted philosphy. Historical events such as the Jewish Holocaust in Europe, Stalin's mass starvation of the Ukrainiuns in the 1930s, the Armenian genocide by the Islamist Turks, Mao's murderous agrarian revolution, and the killing fields of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, are ignored by the non-interventionists. All instances where American pacifism and non-intervention helped to cause murder on a scale never before seen in human history.

No doubt, the non-interventionists will similarly ignore the threat of the Taliban to Afghani citizens, with an American pull-out.

To the non-interventionists, protecting the rights of young women from having their ears and noses cut off is not enough of a "rationale" for keeping our troops in this war-torn South Asia country.

(H/t HotAir)