Kafirs "Fix" Kandahar? 'Tis to Laugh

The sorry spectacle of crumbling, Canadian-built schools and infrastructure in Afghanistan, the centerpiece of Canada's plan to "fix" the joint via the counter-terrorism strategy of sucking up to the locals, elicits the wrath of the Toronto Star--but for an entirely wrong reason:

A classroom in what was one of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s “signature projects” in the Taliban’s birthplace has been turned into a curtained maternity ward.

Across the hall, another classroom is a well-stocked pharmacy where a man in a white lab coat dispenses medicine to women enshrouded in burqas, balancing infants on their laps.

Women sitting on rough-hewn benches in the dark hallway, the hoods of their heavy burqa veils draped over their shoulders, tittered and grumbled at the first glimpse of a foreign male.

“Oh, here comes another infidel taking pictures of our women,” muttered an older matron. “They are after us and our people.”

She turned to the others and scolded: “Please, cover your faces!”

In Kandahar’s badlands, the Taliban don’t have to force people to live under repressive rules with the barrel of a gun.

They comply as a matter of habit, deeply rooted in ancient, often severe, Pashtun culture that thrives in the deprivation of desert villages.

Building schools and training thousands of teachers was one way Harper hoped to help modernize Kandahar province, and wean its people off extremism.

It looks like he lost an enormous bet, perhaps by walking away too soon from the table.

Nuh uh. We could stayed at that table and thrown a gazillion more dollars at the problem, and entremism (a.k.a. by-the-book Islam) would be just as appealing as it was before we squandered all that moolah. And why would that be? It is not, as the Star claims, for lack of money. It's because, in a nutshell, we're infidels, and for that they hate us.