for rescuing Afghani women from the horrors of education, health care, jobs, legal rights and freedom. Show your appreciation by buying Afghani Heroin and support our War of Terror against anyone who poses a threat to our Criminal Enterprises, Foreign Policies and acrane mystical rationales which our arms industry uses to sucker more money out of us to please our Gods, the Almighty Dollar, Mars, JHVH, Jupiter, Croesus and Mammon.

Yeah, those two bozos founded Al Qaeda and unleashed them on the Soviets who had brought the 20th Century to that foreboding place.

this is horrible. This is the real deal - the real thing to be worried and outraged about. Thanks for reporting this.

I hope the obama adminstration acts quickly to condemn this in word and in deed- by tying our actions to the repeal of this regressive disgusting abomination - an obvious violation of human rights. Karzai should be ashamed!

Makes me wonder too- is he not popular with women? Is this a ploy to actually keep them from voting in the upcoming elections?

Who knew? Wow.

When will the women fight back against this nonsense?

Most of the country still lives in the Bronze Age.

The people who agree with us are in a minority.

The Afghan left REFUSED to face this reality in the 1970s. They tried to modernize the country with a coup and a five year plan.

See how well that worked?

You really ought to read some real books about the country because your outrage feels right to you from your perspective here, but your outrage also betrays the kind of stunning ignorance about the population of Afghanistan that has been leading to disaster since 1973.

It was the Afghan left's adamant refusal to face reality that led to the 1973 coup and the formation of the mujahedin and the 1978 coup and finally the Soviet invasion and then Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

When less than half of the country wants women's rights, you're not going to have women's rights unless you also have a military dictatorship like Saddam Hussein's to force them down the throats of the people who don't want to live that way.

And the Taliban is way way worse, no matter what you say.

as it is owned by Hamid Karzai's brother and Hamid himself has eaten there.

Just when we finished reading about hope for women in northern Afghanistan.

With locations in Baltimore MD, San Francisco CA, and Cambridge MA.

Some years ago, Mahmoud brought his brother Hamid, to San Francisco, and tried to persuade him, over dinner at The Helmand, to come live with him in San Francisco. But Hamid insisted on returning to his war-torn country, Afghanistan, to help unite the warring factions. Years earlier, Mahmoud had helped his brother get a university education in India, sending him $90 a month, part of his earnings as a busboy in a San Francisco restaurant.

http://www.inetours.com/Pages/Dining_Archive/The_Helmand.html

*sigh* If only...

Moving beyond the mainstay progressive view of all cultures as part of a wondrous, colorful mosaic, is to be commended, for it hid from view intolerable cruelties. The challenge for us is not to do what British imperialists did, and look to things like wife-burning and other signs of a sick culture, as fair warrant to execute our own sick desire for foreign rape and righteous revenge. Hard to do this, me things, unless we find begin to accept that all ill-treatment to women is born out of a immature child-rearing: we need to understand that women who are treated without respect and given little love while they were being "raised," cannot help but be abusive toward their children. From this experience is born further periodical heavy turns towards the patriarchal, toward all things which evidence intense hatred and fear of women.

The Tragedy of Afghanistan by Raja Anwar.

It's by a Pakistani left wing journalist.

It tells the story of how the Afghan left screwed up the country and provoked a civil war and caused the Soviet invasion and made things much much much worse for women in the process -- by trying to push the country too far, too fast using the power of the central government in Kabul.

Karzai was there. He saw that happen.

Do you think he's going to let that happen again?

No.

Read this book and then you'll get a clue as to why Karzai isn't going to let that happen again.

The road to reform in Afghanistan has to be gradual.

There are people there who value their tribal Bronze Age lifestyle so much, they're willing to pick up a Kalashnikov and fight for it and die for it.

It's just a fact and there's nothing we can do but be patient and deal with the stress of watching things happen that make us cringe.

It's the only way anything will change.

You cannot point guns at Pushtuns and make them abandon tribal ways.

Everyone who tries that ends up getting shot at right away.

because they're the ones who stand in the way of progress. All they have to do is say NO! MINE! YOU CAN'T HAVE THAT! and the earth stops. When has a political party ever pandered to liberals? Liberals don't control anything. They don't grab onto their guns and earned income for dear life--they are more prone to delegating authority and resources so that everyone gets a share.

A dam generates more power than a free-flowing river.

This law is awful. But I would like to clarify a couple of points on it that get glossed over in this blog post as well as in the BBC article. Facts are friends.

The law does allow a man to expect sex from his wife once every four days unless she is ill. Which is awful and will probably be abused as an open pass to rape for many.

"The circumstances of the bill's passage have raised questions as well, with Senator Humeira Namati saying that the bill was not read out or debated in the House of Elders, the Afghan National Assembly's upper house and Shinkai Zahine Karokhail of the House of the People stating the bill received only limited debate in the lower chamber. "They wanted to pass it almost like a secret negotiation," Karokhail told the Guardian. "There were lots of things that we wanted to change, but they didn't want to discuss it because Karzai wants to please the Shia before the election." Namati calls the new law "worse than the Taliban"."

So arguably this law a reflection of Karzai's disgusting pre-election pandering and can't be taken to reflect the ENTIRE government of Afghanistan, so there is some hope that it won't stick around. And given he has refused so far to give an official version to the west, there is also hope that some outside pressure might put an end to this stupidity.

And lastly, the proposed minimum marriage age for girls was 9, the law makes it 16, while that's bad that you can force a 16 to marry it's not quite the 'child marriage' that people think about, e.g. the 9 year old in Saudi Arabia recently. And the original version tried to make temporary marriages legal, but that part was removed. So this really awful, it shouldn't be made to sound even more awful than it is. This is a serious issue and being accurate can only help with the discussion.