Time Magazine has a provocative front-page cover this week entitled “What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan.” It features a woman whose nose was cut off by the Taliban… last year. I’m fairly certain we were in Afghanistan last year, so the logic escapes me. The point is that, whenever the war machine is threatened, the hawks retreat to prop up the effort through humanitarian rhetoric. In fact, Afghan women have it worse off now than they did under the Taliban. I learned that from listening to Afghan women.

Using women in Afghanistan, or any other oppressed group, as a shield to continue wars is really an odious tactic. This war, the costliest in US history, should be justified on the basis of national security interests. Humanitarian reasons can justify peacekeeping missions, but if we stayed at war for 9 years based on what would happen if we left, we’d have garrisons actively fighting in over 100 countries and basically all of our citizens would be off at war. Surely this makes Bill Kristol go over the moon, but the rest of us should be worried. And, as Nick Kristof reports, the people we presume to “save” would rather be saved differently:

What’s more, an unbalanced focus on weapons alone is often counterproductive, creating a nationalist backlash against foreign “invaders.” Over all, education has a rather better record than military power in neutralizing foreign extremism. And the trade-offs are staggering: For the cost of just one soldier in Afghanistan for one year, we could start about 20 schools there. Hawks retort that it’s impossible to run schools in Afghanistan unless there are American troops to protect them. But that’s incorrect.

CARE, a humanitarian organization, operates 300 schools in Afghanistan, and not one has been burned by the Taliban. Greg Mortenson, of “Three Cups of Tea” fame, has overseen the building of 145 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan and operates dozens more in tents or rented buildings — and he says that not one has been destroyed by the Taliban either.

Aid groups show that it is quite possible to run schools so long as there is respectful consultation with tribal elders and buy-in from them. And my hunch is that CARE and Mr. Mortenson are doing more to bring peace to Afghanistan than Mr. Obama’s surge of troops.

The American military has been eagerly reading “Three Cups of Tea” but hasn’t absorbed the central lesson: building schools is a better bet for peace than firing missiles (especially when one cruise missile costs about as much as building 11 schools).

Precisely. The Revolutionary War cost, in today’s dollars, what we spend in a little over a week in Afghanistan. And it’s doing nothing to make either us or even the Afghan people safer. Self-serving tools like Time Magazine’s Richard Stengel can wave the bloody cover story all they want, but they’re merely taking the country, like other failed empires before it, into oblivion.