Salon.com News | We're losing the war in Afghanistan, too: "Many Afghans, especially women, have found this sort of unfounded cheerfulness, and the comparisons to the Taliban era, annoying. (The fact is that the majority of school age girls in Afghanistan are not back in school.) One Afghan woman, an activist, put it succinctly to me in a meeting in July: 'When you compare life to the Taliban, just about every situation seems like a paradise. Afghan women want their rights to be judged in the same ways women's rights are judged in other countries. Not by the Taliban standard, but by the human rights standard.' "

This, in stark contrast with the Bush administration spin.