Today, First Lady Laura Bush arrived in Afghanistan for a half-day visit. She met President Hamid Karzai, but the focus of the trip was the women of Bamiyan province. In Bamiyan, Habiba Surabi, the country’s first female governor, accompanied Mrs. Bush, who met with women police trainees and visited an orphanage being built with the assistance of the Afghan-U.S. Women’s Council. (Seven years ago the Taliban regime dynamited two giant statues of Buddha that had stood for more than 1,500 years in that remote province.)

The contrast between the much-criticized Karzai government and the Taliban could not be greater. Karzai is struggling, but now children go to school and many of them are girls—about 38,000 according to Kabul’s statistics. Females constitute 45 percent of the school population, up from about zero during the days of Taliban rule.

Yet progress for schoolgirls in Bamiyan—and across the country—is in jeopardy. “We have seen a resurgence of Taliban and Al Qaeda killings and kidnappings in Afghanistan,” Mrs. Bush said. “I don’t want people to think it means we need to give up. I think it just means we really need to stand more strongly with Afghanistan.” We certainly do, and the First Lady will make this point on Thursday in Paris when she addresses a donor conference for Afghan reconstruction.

As the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens notes in his most recent column, there are military solutions to insurgencies. That, of course, is true in Afghanistan, and Mrs. Bush’s efforts remind us why we need to support the struggling Karzai government.