The party of values
What nice people there are running Afghanistan.
Afghanistan’s upper house of Parliament has condemned the presidential pardon of a journalist sentenced to 20 years in prison for downloading an internet article about women’s rights and Islam…The upper house “expresses its strongest concerns and annoyance and considers this decision contrary to the Islamic values and the laws in place in the country”, said the statement signed by the speaker of the upper house on Monday. It called on Kambakhsh to serve his term, and said that those convicted of apostasy and hatred of Islam must be punished.
So the upper house of Afghanistan’s Parliament thinks apostasy and hatred of Islam in the form of downloading an internet article about women’s rights and Islam must be punished with 20 years in prison if not execution. So anything short of that, like permanent exile from home and friends and relations, is contrary to Islamic values. Well how horrible Islamic values must be then.
The only difference I can see between the Taliban and the current government we installed in Afghanistan is that the latter is at least nominally on our side.
It’s easy to despair about the current Afghan regime, but the Taliban were much worse.
As Terry Glavin says
‘In the days before September 11, 2001, Pakistan’s ISI was still sending convoys of free supplies and armaments to Taliban training camps, which regularly produced thousands of jihadist mercenaries for assignment to the Maghreb, the Caucusus, Central Asia and Kashmir – Arabs, Algerians, Chechens, Filipinos, the lot. Al Qaida was operating openly, flush will Arab oil money, and Osama Bin Laden was celebrating the success of his agents’ assassination of Ahmed Shah Mahsood, the last great hope for unifying the Afghan resistance under progressive leadership.
Several million Afghans were refugees, wandering the far corners of the world or rotting in refugee camps. Roughly two million Afghans had already been slaughtered in the country’s abbatoir of war, and by the summer of 2001, five million Afghans were on the brink of starvation. In the northern provinces, people were reduced to eating grass and rats. Women were slaves. Music was banned. Even kite-flying was banned. The Taliban had shut down the UN’s polio immunization program. Aid workers, foreign doctors and UN food program officials were routinely harrassed and arrested on charges of spreading Christianity or consorting with Afghan women.
Eight years later, millions of girls are in school. The country has a constitutional government that reserves a quarter of its parliament to women. There are a dozen universities, several dozen newspapers, radio stations and television stations, and one in six Afghans owns a cellular phone. Five million refugees have returned. More than 80 per cent of the people have access to basic medical services. Almost all children have been immunized against polio and childhood diseases.’
http://transmontanus.blogspot.com/2009/09/we-are-hurtling-toward-vietnam-ending.html
No one would want to dispute the changes that have taken place in Afghanistan since the Taliban were ousted, and no doubt the Taliban were as hated in Afghanistan as they apparently were during their recent, temporary ascendency in the Swat Valley. The question, I suppose, is whether these changes represent a genuine trend, or whether they are the temporary effect of large numbers of troops on the ground. The fact that increased levels of both American and British troops have been called for, at the same time that the Afghan parliament has demonstrated a tendency to support Islamist decisions, suggests, at the very least, that the nation-building that Terry Glavin speaks of, much as we should like it to continue, is under severe stress. How likely is it that it will outlast the present military operations in the country?
Are you willing to die, or have your children die, to “liberate” an Afghanistan that seems to not fully “want” to be “liberated”? If not, then how can you support this “nation building” exercise. The two wars have cost the US over a trillion dollars, and I’m not sure, as Eric points out, that there has been any true structural change.
If your answer is “yes,” then where does it stop? Is it the role of the United States or the “West” to forcibly “liberate” all the nations under totalitarian or regressive regimes? Why not? Especially since such an exercise in tiself creates a great deal of (ongoing) misery.
I despise fundamentalist Islam. I’m just not sure it is the role of a fading, deeply indebted nation to solve all the world’s problems…especially given the propensity of said nation’s elite to use the excuse of such wars to profiteer and pursue narrow economic and power politics goals.
The alternative to supporting the current Afghan regime is allowing Afghanistan to revert to the situation which existed ptior to 2001, which was not very good either for Afghanistan or for the West.
To say this is, of course, not to say that the West should “liberate” all the nations under totalitarian or regressive regimes and solve all the world’s problems. That is not a practical proposition.