"The cultural relativists can't excuse evil"

The problem is they do:

In November, when a group of unveiled girls was attacked by men on motorcycles who sprayed acid in their faces as they were walking to morning classes in Kandahar, Canadians were shocked...

...millions of brave Afghan schoolgirls are dedicated to pursuing their studies, in sometimes perilous and hostile circumstances, and their devotion is heartfelt, homegrown and hardy. It has not been "imposed" upon them by the "West."

As Canadians, we should be proud and honoured that history has afforded our country a specific opportunity to help young Afghan women assert their fundamental right to education. Our focus should be on how we can do more, and better. Instead, a bizarre kind of cultural relativism has come to infect national debates about the Afghan mission, clouding our judgment and entirely obscuring the very meaning of universal human rights...

Human rights are culturally relative, the thinking goes, and the universality of human rights is some sort of western imperialist construction. It is as though girls have no right to read if their "culture" forbids it. It is a rarely scrutinized assumption, but it is ubiquitous in Canadian universities, and it reaches its most toxic concentrations in "anti-war" debates...

Afghanistan is not just a theatre of war in the conventional meaning of the term. It is also a battleground of values. But it is not a clash between "western" and "eastern" cultures. The Afghan people want their girls to go to school. The Afghan people do not want the Taliban. But in Canada, it has nonetheless become necessary to point this out, over and over, and also to point out what it is that the Taliban actually do want.

"They want what they had before 2001: an extremist, eccentric Islamic state where the sports stadium is used for public executions of dissenters, homosexuals and women accused of adultery," Cheryl Benard of the Rand Corporation recently reminded us here in the "West." What the Taliban want is a place apart from humanity, where "religious police roam the streets with sticks to beat anyone whose beard or chador is too short; and all education for girls is eliminated."..

Yet to hear from some of the more prominent "troops out" voices in Canada, the Taliban are merely "dissidents" or "the resistance." To listen to these voices, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Taliban were some quaint tribe, engaged in a noble fight against the power-hungry, capitalist West.

Once you strip away the misleading "explanations" offered up by the cultural relativists, all that remains is disgraceful excuse-making for an ideology that requires its adherents to pull women's fingernails out for the crime of wearing nail polish. It is an ideology engaged in an open revolt against humanity, against the values shared by Afghans and Canadians alike, and against an entire international order founded in the aftermath of the Holocaust...

Lauryn Oates is a founding member of the Canada Afghanistan Solidarity Committee and project director of Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan's Excel-erate Teacher Training Program. She has advocated for the rights of Afghan women and girls since the Taliban invasion in 1996 and travels frequently to Afghanistan.

And from Terry Glavin:

...
Here's a "why we fight" photograph I took of Lauryn and some of her sisters in Afghanistan a couple of months ago:

Meanwhile, the sensible conclusion to a Washington Post editorial:

The way to avoid a quagmire is not to hold back on U.S. military reinforcements or development aid but to assemble a national civil-military plan that integrates war-fighting with reconstruction and political reconciliation. As Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) points out, such a plan was the foundation of the U.S. recovery in Iraq, but the model has never been applied in Afghanistan. That's largely because the United States must share authority with some 40 allies, many of which place strict limits on what their troops may do, insist on managing their own development programs, or both. The Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai, mired in corruption and increasingly at odds with U.S. commanders, is also not on board.

Afghanistan doesn't need to become the 51st state, but it does need a single, coherent, integrated plan to become a state strong enough to resist the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Creating one will require some aggressive diplomacy and maybe a little political china-breaking. That's something for which the State Department's new envoy to the region, Richard C. Holbrooke, is known. But low-balling the scale of the challenge, or the costs it may incur, won't help.

But realism does not exclude trying to do what we reasonably can for the women of the country, as I think Ms Oates well argues.

One more example of the many difficulties Afstan faces:

Afghanistan's presidential elections will be delayed four months until Aug. 20 to allow extra international forces enough time to bolster security, the election commission said Thursday...