Susanne Koelbl talking to Afghan pop star Aryana Sayeed:

'Sayeed: Maybe now that they have access to women, some cannot control themselves. But you should not condemn an entire people because of the mistakes of individuals. The biggest problem for these men is their lack of education.

DER SPIEGEL: Has nothing changed in the 17 years since the Taliban were driven out of Afghanistan, even after countless billions of euros of investment in the country?

Sayeed: Progress is happening very, very slowly. When I returned to Afghanistan eight years ago, there were hardly any women on TV stations or elsewhere, and now there are a few more.

DER SPIEGEL: You are the only international pop star to regularly give concerts there. Your videos show you in tight costumes and high heels, and your enemies accuse you of offending the culture and being shameless.

Sayeed: At first it hit me very hard, as if I was naked, until I told myself I wasn't doing anything wrong, that my clothes are in order and that I support the majority who want to live differently. Now I focus on this majority, and, look, at first, when I posted a photo on social media, out of 2,000 comments, 1,000 were negative. Today out of 1,000 comments, only 100 are negative. Something's moving.

DER SPIEGEL: How are women's lives in Afghanistan today?

Sayeed: So many young ladies come to me and tell me about women who are tortured, killed, beaten by their husbands, young girls who are forced to get married. All this happens there all the time, every day. Even the girls who go out and earn their own money are not really independent. They, too, obey men, have to obey orders. Out of a hundred women in Afghanistan, maybe two are really free.'

Read the interview in Der Spiegel here.

Not only couldn't NATO secure the whole country, but the nation building mission was an utter failure as well, even in the so-called secured territories.

I remember that Dutch soldiers in Afghanistan told me that they were on a mission to give women and girls in Afghanistan a chance to go to school.
If only two percent of the women in Afghanistan is really free -- and this is nothing new, but Afghanistan is another forgotten war -- I would like to ask, also thinking of all the casualties, was it worth the trouble?

The only NATO mission that more or less succeeded in the last decades was the bombing of Serbia and the creation of an independent Kosovo in the aftermath of that military operation.

Of course you can say that NATO is just there to prevent war not to go to war, but sometimes I fear that the NATO armies will start a war that they can win, a war against their own citizens.