(via LGF) An article in the UK Guardian asks the question, "Is Afghanistan better off as a result of the US intervention?".    The Guardian is normally one of the most criticial-to-the-US newspapers in the UK -- so much so that many conservative-leaning bloggers have dubbed it Al-Gardhiyan ;-).    In this article, the answer is unquestionably "Yes".

So was it worth it after all? The daisy-cutters and the cluster bombs, the misguided missiles butchering wedding parties while al-Qaida slipped away? Now, a year after Kabul fell as the Taliban left their hot dinners on the front line and ran, was it worth the killing of anything from 800 to 3,000 men, women and children?

Of course it was, said everyone I asked. They all had their grotesque Taliban tales. "Right there, bodies hanging, rotting, stinking!" said a trader in Chicken Street, the tourist trinket centre. Taliban horror stories poured out of everyone, unstoppable like water from a broken tap: "I was walking with my cousin and her husband outside here," said another man. "The vice and virtue police beat them both with big sticks, beat them to pieces, blood everywhere, because her ankles showed too much under her burka. I stood there, ashamed, but there was nothing I could do. I didn't go out after that."

In the remainder of the article, the author states that not a single person she was able to contact on the street preferred Taliban-rule to US Intervention.    She spends far too much time, IMHO discussing the symbolic value of the Burqa as a measure of Women's liberation in Afghanistan.   There are many women in Afghanistan who, quite simply, choose to wear the burqa as a connection to generations of tradition with their mothers and grandmothers.  

Nevertheless, the broader point is still well made -- especially when one considers that for the first time in decades, the new "Afghan Refugee Crisis" isn't Afghani's leaving their native country but rather the plight of the MILLION who've RETURNED to the country since the fall of the Taliban.   Voting with your feet is perhaps the most profound measure of hope and confidence available.