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En route to Charikar, Parwan Province, Afghanistan. 13 September 2012. ..A male foreigner does not have much of an insight into the life of women in Afghanistan, not even as a guest in someone's home. Pictures taken by outsiders often seem to confirm prejudices; or they raise questions without ever providing certainties. Is the girl in the group a child bride on her way to an arranged marriage? If so, has the mother agreed to the marriage? Or is she resigned to seeing her daughter suffer the same fate that perhaps she herself did (often causing lifelong trauma)? ..These traditions are more deeply entrenched than those other social and domestic structures that have been broken down in the many misguided attempts to impose “progress” from without. Not only did they withstand the Soviets' socialist experiments, but they will also survive the West's cultural re-education project that is tied to its enforcement of peace... (KEYSTONE/VII Photo/Daniel Schwartz)