Ann Friedman has a really good piece in this month’s American Prospect about getting rid of the illusion that the Afghanistan war will be a net benefit for women’s rights. Clearly, sensibly and powerfully, she notes that none of the Afghan women she can find are under that particular misimpression, despite the noble and laudatory sympathies of American feminists. I was trying to get at Ann’s points in this post about divorcing the security rationales for the war from the flimsier human-rights based arguments for it.

That said, I think this goes too far:

To me, the answer is tragically apparent: It doesn’t matter whether U.S. military intervention can be a force for humanitarianism because, in Afghanistan, it never has been and won’t become one.

That’s not the case. The presence of NGOs in places currently held by the Taliban and potentially cleared by U.S. forces really is a force for humanitarianism, even if it’s at best a marginal or peripheral result of the war. I don’t dispute that it’s an emotionally manipulative and simplistic thing to keep saying, “But the Taliban are horrible!” But, you know, the Taliban are horrible, and there needs to be a way to balance the benefits for human rights — even if only by degree — of the diminishment of the Taliban with the horrors of war. And yes, ought implies can, and can is a debatable proposition to say the least. But I don’t want the debate to carom between multiple poles of simplicity.