As the fighting in Afghanistan continues to worsen, there are new questions about the government that we are fighting to maintain. An Afghan appeals court sentenced journalism student Parwez Kambakhsh, 24, to twenty years in prison for asking questions about women’s rights under Islam. The sentence for blasphemy was considered a bizarre civil liberties victory since he was facing the death penalty.
Kambakhsh was studying journalism at Balkh University in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. He was also writing for local newspapers when he was arrested in October 2007. He was accused of asking blasphemous questions in class and distributing an article from the Internet about women’s rights and Islam.
Two students and three teachers testified against him. However, the first witness told the court that he was coerced into his statement by Afghan intelligence people — the people we helped train. He also said that his professor threatened him with expulsion if he did not cooperate.
A journalist faces the death penalty for simply printing a translation of the Koran, here
What I fail to understand is why only the military situation is being raised during this campaign and not the drift of the government toward the same harsh Taliban policies and Sharia law.
I thought we got rid of the Taliban in order to free the men and women of Afghanistan! This is a very important example of our failures in Afghanistan due to our fever to attack Iraq. Now our finest have to go back to Afghanistan in force in order to root out the Taliban again. But will that actually free the Afghan people??
The separation of church and state is an imperative to freedom. The Bush Administration totally screwed up our Afghanistan adventure and I don’t know if it’s possible to redeem it. Sharia Law may be part of Islamic tradition, but its chief weakness is that it seems there is no organized judicial structure, leaving its enforcement to the whims of the particular hearing body. I think redemption is improbable because the overwhelming majority of the male Afghani’s and no doubt many females, are culturally imprinted with the belief in the correctness of the system. Had we first gone in, ignored Iraq and concentrated on freeing the country from Sharia Law, worked to help them develop a more viable judicial system and released the bonds of Afghani women change may have been possible. Instead, in their enormous incompetence the Bush Administration took the easy route, made deals with warlords and surveyed the money making possibilities. The stupidity of our nation’s supposed “serious” foreign policy people and their MSM claque, knows no bounds.