Aug. 5: Ms Naderi, who heads the group, Women for Afghan Women, would be the first to concede that things are already bad enough for women in Afghanistan without a return to a government run by the Taliban.
Noorin TV in Kabul has been running what it has called an investigative series suggesting that the shelters, all operated by independent charities, are just fronts for prostitution. The series has offered no evidence, and the station never sent anyone to visit the principal shelters.
The Afghan President, Mr Hamid Karzai, once seen as a champion of women's causes until he failed to deliver on promises to appoint many women to Cabinet posts, convened a commission to investigate complaints against women's shelters. A report is expected soon. The panel's chairman is a conservative mullah, Nematullah Shahrani, who has publicly bandied about the prostitution claim.
Even in the absence of a government run by the Taliban, Afghan women suffer from religious extremism, although they have enjoyed a great deal of progress. Thousands of girls schools have opened since the fall of the Taliban, and women are active in Parliament and the aid community, where an estimated half a billion dollars in international assistance is now destined for gender-equality programmes.
“Feminists have long argued that invoking the condition of women to justify occupation is a cynical ploy,” wrote Ms Priyamvada Gopal in The Guardian, a liberal British newspaper, on Wednesday, "and the Time cover already stands accused of it."
BagNews, a left-leaning website about the politics of imagery in the media, saw the matter in conspiratorial terms. “Isn't this title applying emotional blackmail and exploiting gender politics to pitch for the status quo - a continued US military involvement?” wrote Mr Michael Shaw.
Aisha (she asked that her family name be withheld) makes an apt symbol of the excesses of the Taliban, and of Pashtun tribal society in remote parts of Afghanistan more generally. Her face, aside from the disfigurement, is as beautiful as that of the Afghan refugee girl whose cover photograph in National Geographic in 1985 became an iconic image of the country's plight.