At the Globe and Mail, Margaret Wente has a preening commentary on the situation for women in Afghanistan.

Why are we in Afghanistan? To do good, of course. To beat back the Taliban so Afghans can build a secure and peaceful state where little girls can go to school and their mothers have the right to go to the market without having acid thrown in their faces.

But that’s not the goal of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. His aim is to get re-elected. So he signed a law that gives the powerful Shia minority the right to treat women the traditional way. According to United Nations organizations, the law legalizes marital rape, gives custody rights to fathers and forbids women from leaving their home without their husbands’ protection.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Karzai’s Western allies – especially Canada – are horrified. Our Foreign Affairs Minister spoke sternly to some Afghan cabinet ministers, and International Trade Minister Stockwell Day demanded a “definitive answer” on the situation. Alas, Canadian scolding isn’t likely to do much good. Mr. Karzai is the democratically elected leader of an independent country, one that Canadian soldiers are dying to protect. The government has the right to pass any laws it wants.

The Westerners who helped Mr. Karzai get elected now despise him. So do most Afghans. But the West can hardly overthrow him now, because that would not be democratic.

The original reason for the war was to stop al-Qaeda from using Afghanistan to mount terrorist attacks on the West. But Western leaders have sold the war on all the good we’re doing there. People are (grudgingly) willing to go along with it, so long as we’re helping little girls go to school …

Personally, I doubt anyone can fix Afghanistan – not even Barack Obama. But both conservatives and liberals have become quite attached to this war. Conservatives think the war will improve security in the West. Liberals think the war will improve the Afghans’ lot. And because the UN approves of it, they think it is an exercise in benign humanitarian intervention rather than hubristic imperial overreach.

Hmmm … hubristic imperial overreach.  Well, let’s recall exactly why we went into Afghanistan.  Remember the attacks of 9/11?  The Hamburg cell trained there after meeting UBL who convinced them to attack the U.S. rather than their original target of Germany.

Since then it has become obvious that an evolution – or devolution – was occurring in which the Taliban and Tehrik-i-Taliban of Pakistan were morphing into something more like al Qaeda with globalist intentions.  Several seasons of counterinsurgency have been wasted in the campaign for Afghanistan with too few forces to do any good.

So the question now isn’t how many al Qaeda are located in Afghanistan or the tribal regions of Pakistan.  The question isn’t how many of the indigenous poor we can strip away from the hard core Taliban.  The question isn’t even how many of the Tehrik-i-Taliban are now globalists.  Most of them, if I have the right sense of things.  They must all be killed.  The real question is without U.S. presence, how many of the Afghans would willingly give safe haven to globalists.  Without force projection and some larger presence in the counterinsurgency campaign, this may be an impossible question to answer.

We aren’t in Afghanistan to change their culture or value system.  Girls going to school is indeed a good thing, but we must not attempt to enforce such an idea with guns.  This is the surest way to defeat.  In short, nation-building must only occur to the extent necessary to give some reasonable probability to the ejection of globalists from the country.  We are there for the safety and security of the West, not to remake them in our own image.