This is from one of the Toronto Star's columnists.

The past couple of weeks have proven to be the most deadly ever for NATO troops.

Canada has already taken a disproportionate hit, both in "blood and treasure" as the military types like to say. This month alone, the number of our dead climbed from 120 to 125. As for the treasure, we're somewhere around $9 billion, including projections for the next two years.

Our troops are stretched, our equipment is tired, and polls show that Canadians want out in 2011 – if not sooner – as Parliament has resolved.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is stepping it up, as perhaps it should have before then-U.S. President George W. Bush decided he wanted Iraq's Saddam Hussein deader or less alive than Osama Bin Laden.

If you recall, among the other slogans used to sell us on Afghanistan was "women's rights." That despite how women such as Canada's intrepid Sally Armstrong and, in the U.S., Mavis Leno (Mrs. Jay), had been attempting to focus attention on the plight of women under the Taliban for years.

But Western leaders did not care, not until it came in handy as a casus belli.

Then those burqa-bound women became part of the propaganda, a sign of progress, a reason to keep on fighting.

"The U.S. military may have removed the Taliban, but it installed warlords who are as anti-woman and as criminal as the Taliban," write Sonali Kolhatkar, co-director of the Afghan Women's Mission, and Mariam Rawi, a pseudonymous Afghan feminist.

"Misogynistic, patriarchal views are now embodied by the Afghan cabinet, they are expressed in the courts, and they are embodied by President Hamid Karzai."

Yes, there has been lots of good news about girls going to school and women in Parliament – although the latter are mostly pro-warlord and keep silent.

But really, these things mean nothing if they are immolating themselves rather than being married off to old men, if they are attacked with acid on their way to class, if they are imprisoned for being raped only to be raped by their jailers, if they are killed for being outspoken.

All these things are happening now, aggravated by relentless war that displaces and impoverishes people. There's no clean water, no sanitation. Children are diseased and hungry.

Widows, with no marketable skills and less literacy, are forced into prostitution. (And how many NATO soldiers are their customers?) A woman is lucky to make it to 40.

Or not so lucky.

A UN report released this month shows that women face more violence than ever.

And yet there's still legislation in the works that will force the minority Shia women to have sex with their husbands or else starve, a bill that the ever-smiling Karzai approved in order to win the coming election.

The occupation has only managed to make Afghanistan more fundamentalist.

In the new documentary Rethinking Afghanistan, human rights activist Ann Jones, author of Kabul in Winter, recalls Faisal Ahmad Shinwari, the chief justice from 2001 to 2006, declaring that women have two rights.

"One, every woman has the right to obey her husband," she quotes him as saying. "Two, every woman has the right to pray, though not in the mosque. That is reserved for men."

This is what we have supported?

Estimates are, we will be spending $3 billion over this year and next. That's assuming, if experience is any indication, that costs don't spiral.

What a waste.

The only way to bring security is protect the women and children, not with bombs and bullets, armour and airplanes, but with secure schools, clean wells, steady supplies of food and legislation that punishes men, not women.

That's how you change a country.

Canada can do much better.