I don't think it is necessarily imperialistic to want Muslim women to have rights. After all, women's oppression is a global phenomenon and so it should also be a global concern; countenancing it in the name of religious or cultural differences just allows us to evade the responsibility of trying to do something about it.
But we should be clear that the US-led invasion of Afghanistan had nothing to do with the feminist sensibilities of George Bush (or Tony Blair). If Bush had been committed to women's welfare, his administration wouldn't have tried to undermine some of their hard-won rights in the US itself. The US "coalition" invaded Afghanistan to kill Osama bin Laden and his cohorts, not to save Afghan women. This is not to deny that Anglo-European men have long harboured the desire to be Muslim women's saviours; it is simply to point out that this desire becomes an alibi for imperialist ventures. Hence the ease with which Bush could package the Afghan war, which is a war for US global supremacy, as a war for Afghan women's freedom.
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