This is today's editorial from an influential paper of record in Inverness, in the Scotch Highlands:

OF all the wars one might consider "justified", Afghanistan is high on the list.

Under previous Taliban governments and in local areas where the Taliban have been in control the treatment of women and of female children in particular has been dreadful beyond words.

The growing of opium poppies supplies the West's illegal drug markets with some of its nastiest wares, destroying countless lives in the process.

More recently Afghanistan has been a centre for training terrorists in their own particular black arts. It has been described as a "crucible" and an "incubator" for terrorism.

But the question is this: can any of these evils be ended by military action of the sort we have spent the last few years prosecuting?

The Taliban government has been overturned, that is true. In many areas girls can now go to school, and the treatment of women has probably improved to some extent. Opium poppy production declined for a while but is rising again. The terrorist training camps are mostly out of action.

So, it is all good: yes?

But how permanent are these changes? Once the troops have left, as they must eventually do, will women become increasingly emancipated, or will the Taliban again take up the reins and enforce their own, peculiar, fundamentalist Islamic view of the world?

And as far as terrorist training camps are concerned, have they closed or simply moved elsewhere?

Different parts of the world have evolved at different speeds. Afghanistan today holds a lot of parallels with Scotland in medieval times.

Our traditional interpretations of religion also led to dreadful treatment of women. It is not that long since we stopped tying women firmly to stakes, piling combustibles around and lighting the whole assembly. Entire communities would gather to watch the woman being burned alive.

All this because neighbours suggested she might be a witch.

Our own education system did not, by and large, educate women or the lower orders until relatively recently.

Women were prohibited from voting until after the First World War and, in legal terms, were long considered the property of men.

Our evolution into a reasonably civilised democracy took many years. Many fought and died along the way. But what emerged seems to be a robust system where women, despite the best efforts of some fundamentalist voices within our own indigenous religions, have real rights within society.

The march of the Taliban and of religious fervour can be compared to England during the Crusades. It is strange that, even today, the Crusades are viewed by the English as heroic.

The power of religion is no longer what it once was. We live in a predominantly secular society.

But it has taken hundreds of years for us to evolve away from the cruel and intolerant society we had been while our religious leaders held sway.

The war in Afghanistan has had the effect of driving the Taliban underground for the time being, but — bizarrely — increasing their popularity with the general population. For the Western troops, with their unmanned drone bombers, their tanks and guns, are seen, not as saviours, but as oppressors.

Peasant farmers are having their livelihoods destroyed in bids to wipe out opium production. Ordinary people with no allegiance to the Taliban have been bombed in their own houses or at community gatherings — weddings and funerals — which military intelligence (now there is an oxymoron for you) have wrongly identified as terrorist gatherings. Many more have lost relatives in incidents of "collateral damage" during attacks on genuine Taliban strongholds.

Ask yourself this: if this was happening here, to your family, your neighbours, your community, who would you blame? Who would you see as evil oppressors, and who would you see as protectors?

The Taliban used to maintain their power in Afghanistan by fear. Now, thanks to us, they are gaining the genuine respect of large numbers of Afghans.

The way we have prosecuted our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has meant that the fundamentalists and militants, once small and isolated groups, have now become mass movements: forces to be reckoned with.

If Afghanistan was not a crucible for terrorism before the war, it is now. We have made the world a more dangerous place, not a safer one.