It's turned out pretty much as bad as we'd feared.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with the point.

It's been a year since the U.S. military's disastrous pullout from Afghanistan,

one that left allies, colleagues, and up to 1,000 American citizens defend for themselves.

That the new Taliban government promised to respect human rights, especially the rights of women,

well, it's turned out as many expected.

Universities and primary schools are open to women,

but girls over age 11 are locked out of secondary schools. Women are only permitted to work in education and health, must keep their faces covered,

must be accompanied by a male guardian in long-distance travel, and swift and cruel punishments for breaking these rules have also returned. Though the Taliban deny it, a division has grown between a political wing there that wants better relations with the outside world and therefore wants to relax restrictions on women, and the clerics in Kandahar, who, like the Ayatollahs in Iran, dictate policy on the ground.

You know, we often hear that all world views are equal, all religions the same, and we should

never impose our values on anyone else.

But the truth is, our ideas about the world and human beings have real consequences and

real victims.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with the point.