President Bush’s presidential library hosted a conference this week in Dallas focusing on promoting women’s freedom in Afghanistan and “advancing their economic opportunity.” Promoting the conference on Fox News last night, Bush said that the U.S. should stay in Afghanistan to protect women’s rights:

VAN SUSTEREN: It is a big event isn’t it, sir?

BUSH: It is. It is big because it will have an impact over the years. The idea of liberating women, empowering women, encouraging women, educating women in Afghanistan is all part of laying a foundation for lasting peace.

My concern of course is that the United States gets weary of being in Afghanistan, it is not worth it, let’s leave. And Laura and I believe that if that were to happen, women would suffer again. We don’t believe that’s in the interests of the United States or the world to create a safe haven for terrorists and stand by and watch women’s rights be abused.

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So it seems that Bush — who started the war in Afghanistan nearly 10 years ago and took much needed resources away from it to start the strategic blunder in Iraq — thinks it should continue on, endlessly, to protect the rights of Afghan women.

While protecting women’s rights in Afghanistan is laudable, especially considering women there have been severely repressed and brutalized by men for decades, committing the U.S. military indefinitely to do it is another story. As Gen. David Petraeus noted when assuming command in Afghanistan, the U.S. military is there to advance political and security goals, not to promote social and cultural norms.

This debate surfaced last year when Time Magazine published a photo of a Bibi Aisha, an Afghan girl defaced by the Taliban for violating social customs, on its cover with the caption: “This is what happens if we leave Afghanistan.” Time received widespread criticism for the cover, with some calling it “emotional blackmail” and even “war porn.” Moreover, the attack on Aisha occurred with U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Their presence there didn’t prevent the attack and moreover, these kinds of local customs aren’t limited to the Taliban either. “The Taliban’s poor treatment of women often comes up as a sub-point here to illustrate the theme that the Taliban are bad,” Matt Yglesias noted last year. “But actually altering social conditions in southern and eastern Afghanistan isn’t on the list of war aims.”

There are other ways to promote the social and economic well-being of Afghan women, but deploying military divisions indefinitely isn’t one of them.

Yesterday, ThinkProgress reported that Rep. Tom Marino (R-PA), who sits on the House Foreign Affairs’ subcommittee on Africa, wondered whether the U.S.’s intervention in Libya means we might “go into Africa next.” Libya is, of course, in Africa. Jay Leno joked last night, “You see why he’s not on the intelligence committee. Even Sarah Palin’s going ‘get a map!’”

Marino’s office scrambled to respond to our story, telling reporters that the congressman was making a distinction between our aerial bombing of Libya and the potential deployment of ground troops — a point that was not made clear in his original statement. “We are not ‘in’ Africa by any means,” a Marino spokesman said. “We do not have ground troops there and, as far as we know, there are no plans to go into Africa.” In fact, the U.S. has bases in Africa and troops on the ground.

As Marino staffers were undertaking efforts to defend their boss’s competency, they were simultaneously undermining that cause. Yesterday, “about a dozen” tea party protesters showed up outside Marino’s district office in Tunkhannock, PA. At the time, Marino, who also sits on the House Homeland Security, was participating in a hearing on the “U.S. Homeland Security Role in the Mexican War Against Drug Cartels.” Marino decided to ditch the hearing and go talk to tea party protesters instead:

During the rally, Renita Fenick, Mr. Marino’s director of communications, came out to hear what the tea party members had to say. She told them the congressman would appreciate knowing he had that kind of support and would pass on their comments.

Ms. Fenick said after the rally she was able to get Mr. Marino on the phone from Washington to speak with those at the Tunkhannock office.

“We pulled him out of a Homeland Security meeting to do it,” she said.

If foreign affairs and homeland security don’t interest Marino, perhaps he should recuse himself from those committees and devote more of his time to tea party rallies.

Last year, Florida pastor Terry Jones sparked worldwide outrage when he threatened to burn a copy of the Quran outside his church. In the midst of the controversy over the Park 51 Muslim cultural center near Ground Zero in New York City, Jones announced that he would burn the Islamic holy book in order to “stop Islam.” He declared that “what we are also doing by the burning of the Quran, we’re saying stop, stop to Islam, stop to Islamic law, stop to brutality.”

The response from U.S. leaders was swift. Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said the burning “could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort.” President Obama called it a “destructive act.” Defense Secretary Robert Gates personally called Jones and asked him not to go through with his plan.

Jones agreed to postpone the burning, but this week, without much fanfare, he burned it anyway. On Sunday, Jones held a “trial”of the Quran in his church, found it “guilty,” and “executed” it.

Fifteen people were killed this morning in Kabul, including ten United Nations workers, when residents enraged at Jones’ act stormed a U.N. office:

Protesters angered by the burning of a Koran by a fringe American pastor in Florida mobbed offices of the United Nations in northern Afghanistan on Friday, killing ten foreign staff members and beheading two of the victims, according to an Afghan police spokesman. Five Afghans were also killed.

The attack began when hundreds of demonstrators, some of them armed, poured out of mosques after Friday Prayer and headed to the headquarters of the United Nations in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

One Afghan official said “several hundred demonstrators were peacefully protesting the purported burning when the gathering suddenly turned violent.” This unfortunate but predictable violence is exactly what Petraeus, Gates, and others warned about.

It’s important to note that several prominent members of the far right — many of them leaders of the anti-Park 51 movement — bashed Petraues for his warnings. Blogger Robert Spencer said he opposed Jones’ plan but called Petraeus’ remarks “a recipe for surrender.” Frank Gaffney criticized Petraues’ “deeply troubling” remarks, and said “[t]he risk is that, were one to take statements like General Petraeus’ to their logical conclusion, any objection to the Quran-derived program of shariah could be deemed an endangerment to our troops overseas. The result of such a practice would inevitably be to put at risk here at home both the American people and their Constitution.” And hate blogger Pamela Gellar wondered “[i]f we stop doing things they dislike, where will we draw the line?”

Today, House Judiciary Chairman and immigration hardliner Lamar Smith (R-TX) published an editorial which claims that the Obama administration is not telling the truth about the progress that has been made along the southern border with Mexico. Smith complains that only 15 percent of the border is “air tight” and notes that “more than 34,000 people have been killed in Mexico due to drug-related violence.” The violence hasn’t spilled over, but Smith seems convinced it will. Smith also rails on Obama for ending the practice of worksite immigration raids and accuses the administration of supposedly cooking its deportation numbers:

While the Obama administration claims their approach is working, the truth is that the Southwest border remains porous and seven million illegal immigrants work in the United States. The administration’s immigration enforcement and border security strategies cannot be effective if it amounts to little more than spin. The American people are smart enough not to buy into the false promise that legalizing millions of illegal immigrants will secure the border and reduce illegal immigration.

Smith calls for the deployment of national guard troops at the border, the expansion of the controversial electronic employment verification system (E-verify), and the completion of a double layer border fence.

Yet, experts call Smith’s “border security first” argument a red herring. The Center for American Progress contends that evaluating border security “cannot and should not be measured against a standard of total control.” Given that most security specialists out there don’t believe it is possible to completely seal the border, “The question should be: Have we implemented the right set of policies and deployed the right set of tools to minimize risk and maximize control in a constantly changing environment with evolving challenges?” While Smith is right that the border is not 100 percent airtight, in terms of risk management, DHS has made serious headway.

Meanwhile, the American people actually are smart enough to know that comprehensive immigration reform that combines a path to legalization with a modernized visa system and continued enforcement efforts will reduce illegal immigration. That’s why a large majority of the public supports it.

Finally, while Smith accuses the Obama administration of fudging its deportation numbers, the immigrant advocacy community would probably argue just the opposite. “What’s disappointing is that this administration is deporting more people than ever before — it’s more well funded than ever before, but many people have the perception that immigration enforcement is underfunded and that this administration is extremely pro-immigrant,” said one advocate. Grassroots groups have launched a campaign to “urge President Obama to use his discretionary authority to stop separating families through deportations.” The White House maintains that “administrative solutions are not feasible or do-able on a large scale.”

Smith’s criticism comes at a time when House Republicans are drafting a “legislative assault on illegal immigration” which includes plans to add more fencing, sensors, agents and drones at the border. The Secure Border Act of 2011 will reportedly require the Department of Homeland Security to submit a five-year plan to Congress that would essentially eliminate unlawful entries and smuggling down. It would be up to Congress to decide whether to fund it or not.

Part of the debate in Washington surrounding American involvement in Libya is whether the U.S. is actually helping terrorists take down Muammar Qaddafi’s regime. Earlier this week, U.S. NATO commander Adm. James Stavridis told the Senate Armed Services Committee that there are potentially “flickers” of al Qaeda and Hezbollah elements within the Libyan rebel movement. However, one senior counterterrorism official has said that “no one should think the opposition is being led by al Qaeda or one of its affiliates.”

Yesterday during a hearing in front of the same committee, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. Mike Mullen echoed those sentiments. “We just haven’t seen anything other than what I would call aspirational from al Qaeda leadership,” he said. But outside of whether anti-American terrorists have joined the Libyan resistance, Defense Secretary Robert Gates later added that even if there are al Qaeda elements, there is “no evidence” the Libyan people would support their ideology. Mullen agreed:

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: Do either one of you believe the Libyan people would stand for an al Qaeda led Libya?

GATES: Absolutely no evidence to support that.

MULLEN: No, I don’t. [...]

GATES: Look, the real power in Libya is in the hands of the tribes and even Qaddafi realizes that. And I just don’t understand how it would be possible for these tribes to want to cede any of that authority to some outside crowd like al Qaeda.

Various reports back up Adm. Stavridis’s statement this week but there is so far no evidence to suggest that al Qaeda or any other terror group is leading the Libyan resistance. U.S. officials reportedly “haven’t seen much, if any” extremist activity in Libya. The rebels themselves say they aren’t affiliated with terrorists, and reporting from the de facto rebel capital of Benghazi this week, The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson concluded of the rebels, “It seems unlikely…that they represent Al Qaeda.”

Conservatives here at home — such as Newt Gingrich and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) — have been attacking President Obama for allegedly committing the U.S. military to fight on behalf of al Qaeda in Libya. Apart from the fact that there is no evidence to support these claims, Gates addressed this argument and noted that it’s important to be mindful that Qaddafi is using it to justify his attacks on the rebels and civilians:

GATES: One of the things that Qaddafi is doing though is in his information operations, he is trying to gin up the narrative that the opposition is in fact led by al Qaeda and so one of the things that’s making it a little difficult is he broadcasts all the time that al Qaeda is involved and al Qaeda is doing this and that. So we just have to be aware that he is using this in his own propaganda.

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