Here is Mark Steyn talking with Hugh Hewitt on the question of whether the war in Afghanistan should be abandoned:

In Afghanistan, it was illegal, it was under the Taliban, illegal by law, by law, for a woman to feel sunlight on her face, illegal by law. And leftist feminists, the left wing feminist organizations in the Western world had absolutely nothing to say about that.

And George W. Bush liberated those Afghan women. He got them out of their burkas. He allowed them to feel sunlight on their face. A year after the Afghan invasion, there were a higher proportion of women elected to the Afghan parliament than to the Canadian parliament. And the idea that you can simply allow this disgusting party of the Taliban effectively to return large parts of Afghanistan to a prison state, is, speaks very poorly for us.

But in a sense, you know, in hard national interest terms, if you want to get out, the thing to do would be to figure out a way to get out without making it look like a defeat. The minute you re-burkaize parts of Afghanistan, what you’re telling the world is that you have been defeated, that the patrons of Osama bin Laden are now back in charge. You couldn’t stick it. You couldn’t stick it. You’re, as the historian Niall Ferguson says … the superpower with ADHD. It hasn’t got the staying power, can’t concentrate long enough… harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.

Now having said that, I think we’ve got confused here. We’re not nation building in Afghanistan. You can’t nation build in Afghanistan. It’s never been a nation in the sense that anybody in the United States or Sweden or Switzerland would recognize. You’re there to identify bad guys, kill bad guys in large numbers. And what has happened, I think, in the sort of multilateralization of the mission there, which wasn’t true at the beginning, by the way, this was a largely American operation in the fall of 2001, with a few special forces from select allies. But since all the sort of non-combat members of NATO have gone in, your Germans and Norwegians and all the rest, the whole thing’s being schoolgirl’d up. And the young men on the streets of Afghanistan and in the hills know that the rules of engagement favor them enormously. And they’ve made a mockery of these NATO forces. NATO and the United States should be there to kill large numbers of bad guys, and nation building is something that will take thousands of years in Afghanistan.

Kill large numbers of the bad guys. Find a way of getting out without  making it look like defeat. Stop using soldiers as social workers. Give up any idea of nation-building.

In our view, all good advice.

But the Afghan women will be re-burkaized. For them to be saved, it is Islam itself that needs to be defeated.

First Islam must be recognized as an irredeemably evil ideology. Then it must be anathematized, in the same way as racism has been anathematized.

If the energy and passion that has gone into saving the world from the imaginary threat of global warming were to be invested instead into saving it from the real threat of Islam, Afghan women might reasonably hope to live their days in the light – and warmth – of the sun.