One of the better, but sadly more neglected, blogs out there is Donald Douglas’ American Power:

Afghanistan Bomb Attack on Girls Highlights Threat to Women’s Education

by Donald Douglas | May 10, 2021

Things are going badly in Afghanistan.

And at almost 20 years, I doubt the U.S. could do more to secure the country, besides sending in 500,000 troops and just take the whole place over. We’re still in Germany, Japan, and South Korea, for darned sake, and as it is the U.S. would probably defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion, although who knows that “China Joe” Biden has up his sleeves? Both China and Russia are major threats, and it’d be nice to know exactly which country — or countries — hacked the East Coast power grid a few days ago. But it probably doesn’t matter, because this kind of thing is going to happen more often, a lot more often, and the Dems probably do not care.

In any case, I’m not against the Afghan pullout, though I’ve also thought the most noble element of our intervention in that country has been our great earlier success at improving human rights, especially for women.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Afghanistan Bomb Attack on Girls Highlights Threat to Women’s Education

Kabul residents on Sunday buried dozens of schoolgirls killed by explosions outside a school

By Sune Engel Rasmussen and Ehsanullah Amiri | May 9, 2021 | 11:54 AM EDT

KABUL—Zainab Maqsudi, 13 years old, exited the library and walked toward the main gate of the Sayed Shuhada school to go home on Saturday when she was blown backward by an explosion. When she stood up, the air was thick with dust and smoke, and she was surrounded by shattered glass. 

“Suicide attack!” everyone yelled, she said, reflecting how common such attacks have become in Afghanistan. She noticed she was bleeding from her arms. An older sister took her to hospital.

“I’m not sure if I will go back to school when I recover,” Zainab, who is in seventh grade, said from her hospital bed Sunday, with her parents by her side. “I don’t want to get hurt again. My body shakes when I think about what happened.”

Preventing girls like Zainab from going to school was the likely goal of the terrorists behind Saturday’s attack in a predominantly Shiite neighborhood of Kabul. Widening access to women’s education was one of the most tangible achievements of the 20-year U.S. presence in Afghanistan—progress that could be reversed once American forces leave the country later this year.

Afghan authorities on Sunday raised the official death toll from Saturday’s attack that targeted schoolgirls at Sayed Shuhada to 53. It was the latest assault on the area’s mostly Shiite Hazara minority, which in recent months has suffered horrific attacks by Islamic State’s Afghan affiliate, including on a maternity ward and an education center.

No group has claimed responsibility for Saturday’s attack. The Afghan president blamed the Taliban. The Taliban denied responsibility and condemned the bombings, accusing Islamic State of being behind them.
On Sunday, residents of the Afghan capital spent the day burying dozens of schoolgirls on a hillside on the outskirts of the capital. Hospitals across the city treated dozens of injured, including several who remained in intensive care.

We went into Afghanistan because the Afghan government, then controlled by Mullah Mohammed Omar and the Taliban, were providing sanctuary for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, after the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. We quickly routed al Qaeda and pushed the Taliban out of power in the government, but we were never able to wipe out the thought and philosophy behind the Taliban and its very conservative religious views. We have been in Afghanistan for 19½ years now, which means that there are Taliban fighters who hadn’t even been born when United States troops moved in.

Natan Sharansky wrote The Case For Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, a book that the younger President Bush purportedly came to like and appreciate for its arguments. The amazon.com link says this about Mr Sharansky:

Natan Sharansky believes that the truest expression of democracy is the ability to stand in the middle of a town square and express one’s views without fear of imprisonment. He should know. A dissident in the USSR, Sharansky was jailed for nine years for challenging Soviet policies. During that time he reinforced his moral conviction that democracy is essential to both protecting human rights and maintaining global peace and security.

Sharansky was catapulted onto the Israeli political stage in 1996. In the last eight years, he has served as a minister in four different Israeli cabinets, including a stint as Deputy Prime Minister, playing a key role in government decision making from the peace negotiations at Wye to the war against Palestinian terror. In his views, he has been as consistent as he has been stubborn: Tyranny, whether in the Soviet Union or the Middle East, must always be made to bow before democracy.

Drawing on a lifetime of experience of democracy and its absence, Sharansky believes that only democracy can safeguard the well-being of societies. For Sharansky, when it comes to democracy, politics is not a matter of left and right, but right and wrong.

This is a passionately argued book from a man who carries supreme moral authority to make the case he does here: that the spread of democracy everywhere is not only possible, but also essential to the survival of our civilization. His argument is sure to stir controversy on all sides; this is arguably the great issue of our times.

Sadly, democracy, a think President Bush believed all people would want once they had the chance to experience it, has not proven that it can stand against a hostile culture, at least not 1,400 years of an Islamic culture which is hostile to its ideas. Dr Douglas wrote that he “thought the most noble element of our intervention in that country has been our great earlier success at improving human rights, especially for women,” but it has become clear that we have improved human rights only via military force; once our military force leaves — and it is already mostly gone — the Afghan government we have imposed and supported will fall, the Taliban will return, and the era of girls being denied education and women reduced to third class status will return.

Theodore Roosevelt once said, “If you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” Well, we never had the Taliban by the balls; we tried to ‘educate’ the Afghans, but it never really took. As we previously noted, neoconservatives like Max Boot seem to want American troops to stay in Afghanistan, practically forever. When Dr Douglas said that he “doubt(s) the U.S. could do more to secure the country, besides sending in 500,000 troops and just take the whole place over,” I doubt we could do such even with half a million troops. The only way to truly defeat the Taliban is how our allies and we defeated Germany and Japan: we killed so many of their fighting-aged men, wounded millions more, and thoroughly cowed the boys too young to fight but growing up, we destroyed their economy and their infrastructure, we rained down so much fire and steel that Germany and Japan simply couldn’t continue to fight. We were not willing to do that in Korea, we were not willing to do that in Vietnam, and we were not willing to do that in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The British could not control the Afghanis in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the Soviets couldn’t control the Afghanis in the late 20^th century, and we can’t control them in the ^st. That their religion and tribalism and culture do not go along with our ideas of what human rights ought to be is, sadly, irrelevant. After 19½ years, there’s really nothing more we can do that we haven’t already done, and we have been able to do far less than President Bush had hoped.