What next in Afghanistan?

They believe in a religion that is grounded in the 13th century.
If someone insults the pope, he doesn't send people out to kill you.
If you insult a Rabbi he doesn't send people out to blow you up.
These people do.
Their beliefs haven't evolved like Christianity and Judaism.
Those two are thousands of years old.
Islam is 700 years old.
A guy, usually a minority, gets drawn into or is a member of the community of Islam and typically is doing okay in America, then he has marital problems, and financial problems.
He gets depressed and wants to die, and rather than die a loser, he can die as a hero.
They convince themselves that they are acting as weapons of Islam.
We kill some Muslims in Afghanistan and they try to kill some of us.
Sometimes they use this as an excuse for their own failures .
Sometimes their frame of mind is, "They killed a hundred of us, in this or that village so we are going to kill a hundred of them."

We need to fight these Jihadi with power and vigor.
We have to be honest with each other, Islam, or at least a significant portion of it, has declared those who don't follow their religion to be the enemy.
They don't wish to be brought into the 21st Century, they think the 13th century was better.
They see influence with their atavistic religion as blasphemy.
Their beliefs codify oppression of Jews and Christians, and returning woman to the "good old days", when one could beat and rape his wife, and she was a slave.
That's the bottom line.
As you can plainly see in Afghanistan and Gaza, when this portion of Islam gains power they are brutal to the extreme.

To me, however, the most obvious crimes of these Islamic  Republican Governments or regimes is their treatment of women.

The religion is primitive
We have to fight them, but I do think one idea might help a little.
We should change our role in Afghanistan to where we are bombing less and causing less casualties.
We should, the civilized world, tell the Muslim countries that are brutalizing and enslaving women, that this is a crime, and we are not  going to tolerate it.
The burka is not a fashion statement, it is a sign if inferiority, a sign of submission.
In Afghanistan women are forced to wear burkas that cover them head to foot, with a small gauze outlet, so that a man can't get a good look at her eyes and be tempted to rape her.

Their have been women in Islamic countries that have been sentenced to be publicly whipped, after reporting a rape.
Because Islamic judges determined that the women in question seduced the rapist by, perhaps a glimpse of hair, or not having the gauze over her eyes, or dancing.

Some people have said to me, "Well, that's their custom, it's not up to us to make them change their customs."

If their customs allow them to brutalize woman and girls, and basically prevent a female from having any opportunities in life other than having babies on demand, and their customs allow men to beat women for whatever reason,
 We have every right in the world to interfere.

We have the duty to interfere.
Women's groups in Afghanistan have asked for protection, what the military calls security.

 One important factor in our thinking should be a consideration of what the impact of casualties will be over time.
A certain amount of innocent people will be killed in any type of warfare, what is the impact of that going to be?

Imagine you are sitting at home, you haven't done anything harmful, and suddenly a missile crashes through your roof and wipes out half your family.
Then you walk up and down the street, and your neighbors homes have been bombed too.
People are killed and crippled all around you.
Then imagine the military shows up and says, "Well, we were after so and so, and to get to him we had to soften up this area. Sorry. It's for a good cause."
Or, "We shelled your house by mistake."
I'm just wondering, will we be creating as many terrorists as we kill?
I'm just wondering what the ratio would be, 10 terrorists for every innocent person we shell?
Less or more?

Afghanistan is asymmetrical warfare, we are not going to conquer the Radical Islamicists in the usual sense of the word.
What we may need to do in Afghanistan is change the focus of the mission from killing Taliban members to protecting the people of Afghanistan.
Afghanistan women's groups have asked for security, for protection of the schools where girls are learning, for the first time in their lives, many of them.
They have been told that we can't afford it, or in the words of one Congressman, "We expect you to take care of that yourselves."
If we were dealing directly with women's rights, at least the women of Afghanistan would support us.
Slavery is wrong, whether the slave is black or white or male or female.
The literal enslavement of women in Afghanistan  is a horror that goes unremarked upon for the most part.

I saw an interview with an Afghanistani woman recently, she had 8 kids, she didn't want anymore, but her husband did.
She was asked, "Who will make the decision?"
She pointed to her husband and said, "He does. We have no choice."
The  reporter, a woman, asked, "Do you know what rape is?"
The woman's eyes grew large, and she looked uncomprehending, "No." she answered, quietly.

This abuse of human beings should be stopped.
That should be the focus of our efforts in Afghanistan.