Paul Thomas: Women who are living worlds apart

As Rudyard Kipling said: "East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet."

This week's Time has a photo of Aisha, a pretty 18-year-old Afghan girl, on the cover. Well, she used to be pretty: now there's a hole where her nose used to be. Aisha's lustrous dark hair conceals the fact that she's also missing her ears. Her nose and ears were cut off by the Taleban, as punishment for running away from abusive in-laws.

Meanwhile, in Sydney a 25-year-old who claims she was sexually harassed by the chief executive of upmarket department store David Jones is suing the retailer for $45 million. Former publicist Kristy Fraser-Kirk alleges that Mark McInnes, who resigned last month admitting conduct unbecoming, made unwelcome sexual advances and tried to kiss her and put his hand under her clothes.

Unless you simply assumed $45 million was an error or a misprint, you're probably wondering how Ms Fraser-Kirk and her legal advisers arrived at this extraordinary figure. It seems they believe her ordeal should entitle her to 5 per cent of David Jones' profits during the seven years McInnes was chief executive and 5 per cent of his salary and entitlements during that period.

One can only admire their restraint in not insisting on a staff discount on all purchases over $100 and a free Christmas hamper.

Aisha's disfigured face partly answers Time's question: What happens if we leave Afghanistan? Inside the implications for Afghan women of a restoration of the Taleban's cruel and misogynistic regime are spelt out.

Under Taleban rule women accused of adultery were stoned to death and those who exposed an ankle were whipped. One of Afghanistan's two female Olympic representatives now trains in the stadium where the Taleban used to play football with women's heads.

Women who dare to work in areas controlled by the Taleban are now being warned to leave their jobs otherwise their children will be beheaded or set on fire.

Afghan women are right to be very afraid. Indeed the question should be framed thus: what happens when we leave Afghanistan?

This week the Netherlands contingent began a withdrawal that will be completed by the end of the year, and other participating nations are putting a timetable on their exit strategies. The US and Britain begin withdrawing troops next year.

Our SAS is due to leave next March and the provincial reconstruction team in Bamiyan next September. John Key was quick to say that Lieutenant Tim O'Donnell's death won't bring the departure dates forward, but it probably eliminates any faint possibility of them being pushed back.

In a sense this is inevitable. Notwithstanding the bold talk of nation-building and crushing the Taleban, Western forces can't remain there forever.

And as the months and years drag by, as casualties mount, as occupation proves harder and bloodier than invasion, as the whole project takes on an air of one step forward, two steps back, it's not surprising that political will and public support is melting away.

If the US had heeded the lessons of history, it might never have gone there in the first place. Britain invaded Afghanistan in 1839 as a gambit in what Kipling called "the Great Game", the 100-year contest with Russia for power and influence in Asia Minor.

Three years later the occupying force straggled out of Kabul on a promise of safe passage only to be systematically massacred. The events leading up to the retreat from Kabul and the retreat itself remain among the worst humiliations in British military history.

The Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan throughout the 1980s in order to prop up a puppet communist regime. Having bombed the place most of the way back to the Stone Age - by 1990 Afghanistan was ranked among the five least developed nations on earth - the USSR pulled out leaving their Afghan comrades to fend for themselves. They couldn't.

But it's hard to avoid the suspicion that the Afghan end game - if one can use that term with its implication of strategic coherence - is being driven by the West's domestic political agendas and shrinking appetite for the conflict, rather than the situation on the ground.

No doubt there will be fine words about the need for an Afghan solution, but the likelihood is that the Taleban rather than anything resembling a civilised and humane central authority will fill the vacuum. And while in the West a half-century of feminism has created a society in which women can wallow in raunch culture and put a $45 million price tag on their dignity, the women of Afghanistan will once again be reduced to vassals for whom the smallest gesture of independence guarantees mutilation or murder.