Democracy On The March Alert from IRIN, with thanks to Sr. Soph:
Kabul, 25 July (Source IRIN) - An Afghan government decision to recreate the notorious Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice has raised grave concerns among human rights groups. The government announced plans last week to re-establish the vice and virtues department, but said it would not return to the hardline ruling enforced by the Taliban.Until the Taliban's five-year rule was ended by the US-led coalition in late 2001, the virtue and vice ministry enforced numerous restrictions. Men were instructed to grow beards and women were forced to wear all-covering burqas, while girls' schools, television and gambling were banned. Even kite-flying was considered a crime. Those who had violated the rules faced imprisonment and public beatings.
"Re-instalment of the Department of Vice and Virtue with no clear terms of reference yet is a matter of concern for us," Ahmad Nader Nadery, spokesman of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), told IRIN in Kabul.
"A similar department under the Taliban regime was a tool to interfere in the privacy of life of every individual to suppress the citizens and to limit all rights and freedoms of people," he said.
According to the Ministry of Pilgrimage and Religious Affairs, the new department would mainly focus on alcohol, drugs, crime and corruption.
While sharing principles with its Taliban-era predecessor, the focus would be on preaching and advising people about the correct way to act, an official said....
Kabul activist Nasrin Abubaker said she believed the office would become "a fully Taliban-like department" within the next two years.
"The government should pay strict attention to the major issues such as the deteriorating security and unemployment in the country rather than focusing on such small matters, which could only bring about new limitations for women and girls," Abubaker said.
Meanwhile, analysts believe that Afghan President Harmid Karzai's cabinet made the announcement after facing considerable pressure from the country's deeply conservative religious scholars, former mujahideen commanders and other extremist groups who hold strong positions in government.
"It is merely an effort from the extremist groups in the government to curb the civil rights and personal freedom of civilians," local analyst Qasim Akhgar said.
'While sharing principles with its Taliban-era predecessor...' says it all.
It's only a matter of time (and probably less than the predicted two years) before it's the real deal.
Praise allah! They're finally going to address all that wanton kite-flying.
I fear that Iraq and Afganistan is lost to the civilized world. Their so called constitution is foundation is based on the koran and follows sharia, the islamic law.
There is very little chance of building a free and viable society there. We should divide Iraq into three countries, leaving a token force in the oil regions. Since islam values human life so little, why should we fight and die for muslims, for nothing. Change the constitution, install true freedom, then there is reason to help the people.
I am a supporter of a war against terrorism. But the war must be fought to win, destroy the enemy, not to appease them.
I am a supporter of a war against terrorism. But the war must be fought to win, destroy the enemy, not to appease them.
posted by: FIVEOFNINE July 25, 2006 09:48 AM
My sentiments as well. I was all for the USA going to Afghanistan and Iraq, thinking that the aim was to destroy our enemy. My disillusionment started the day I heard that the Sharia was to be allowed as the supreme law in the newly found constitutions of both these countries. That we allowed this to happen without even a whimper of protest shows to me that we are engaged in the 'mother' of all appeasements.
Telemachus: he who fights from afar. The son of Odysseus, but in his own way, as wily as Odysseus. For it is a wily think to "fight from afar," with the least expenditure of one's own money, materiel, and the lives of one's own citizens. It is always better to keep the enemy at bay by playing constantly upon divisions within that enemy camp, and where there is no sense of loyalty to a single nation-state, the task is made easier by that lack.
Do not go into Muslim countries to rescue them from their own wretchedness. Do not try to: end poverty, transplant democracy in sandy desert soil in Iraq, or stony mountain soil, in even more primitive Afghanistan. Do not rescue Muslims from "poverty" through the Jizyah of Western foreign aid. Do nothing at all to save them from the consequences of Islam itself.
Only, and from afar, and as much as possible by the inflication of as much damage and pain as can be accomplished through and from the air, in the case of military actions, and through the imposition of other measures, such as a refusal to accept goods (say, any goods from Pakistan), and the severing of certain means of transportation (by air, for example), and other means that do not involve combat, or any kind of entangling pseudo-alliance with Muslinms, who cannot conceivably be permanent, or unfeigned, allies of any Infidel people or polity unless, and precisely to the extent that, they ignore the tenets, and are unaffected by the attitudes and atmospherics, of Islam.
We saw the real Afganis a week ago in the pages of a Sunday newsmagazine. There they were, turbanned, prematurely wizened, sitting next to their confused, or apprehensive, or oblivious, child brides, aged 11 and 11 and almost 11. We have come to realize that our government leaders keep being misled, keep taking as representatives of this or that Muslim country the entirley unrepresentative people who spent years in exile in the West, and those years of exile -- the forty-five years that Ahmad Chalabi spent, or that so many other Iraqi exiles did, turned them into, at least outwardly, plausible Western -- i.e., non-Muslim -- men, capable of rational thought, of free and skeptical inquiry (at least up to a point), aware of the primitive nature of their own societies (or sometimesnot, sometimes having forgotten what those societies are really like). The Afghani-Americans, thos like Khailizad who was formerly stationed in Afghanistan and others who have gone back to help, are not representative of the real Afghanistan, and it is the real Afghanistan, outside that thin veneer to be found among those Western exiles (and Karzai himself has lived for long periods in the West, and several of his siblings own and run Afghani restaurants in Cambridge and near Washington D.C.), which must be taken into account, and not this Potemkin-village Iraq or Afghanistan that has so fooled so many of those making policy in our endlessly naive, endlessly messianic, impossibly obtinate administration.
So our troops are being murdered and maimed just so some mullahs can set up a sharia state?
So our troops are being murdered and maimed just so some mullahs can set up a sharia state?
Posted by: IceDragon at July 25, 2006 02:39 PM
What did you expect when Dubya parrots 'Izlum is a religion of peace', Condi can't stop seeing the 'benvolence in the heart of Islam' and Karen Hughes is hired to cater to Muslim sentivities?
Not that I am not disappointed, but with fools running it, 'war on terror' (what IS that?) was lost before it started.. and sure enough, now you have it.
OT, but important.
I choked on my sammich today watching George W. Bush being so warm and friendly with the Prime Minister of Iraq al Maliki, who recently supported Hezbollah against Israel and the U.S..
This Islamofascist cretin is under seige in his own country, so he comes to Washington to beg Bush to send more troops to Baghdad to bleed and die for Islamofascism. (And Islamofascism it is, CNN carried a report - a report that Fox and MSNBC will never carry, that the situation for women in Iraq is worse now than it was under Saddam, in fact women are being threatned if they drive a car, and have to (for safety sake) wear hijab.. not to mention that al Maliki's buddy and boss Ayatollah al Sistani of SCIRI has issued fatwa's of suppport for Hezbollah and against the U.S., as well as issuing death fatwa's for gays, prostitutes and liquor store vendors - well The Christian Coalition wishes they could do as much).
And here is what Dubya said, with a straight face yet, Iraq has an "advanced" modern consitution.
Advanced? Here is article 2 of the constitution.
That is what Dubya calls advanced. Either the man is lazy, illiterate and stupid or he thinks that we the people are..actually the both is true.
On top of which he is incapable of admitting error or mistakes, that's a human problem, shared especially by Muslims and Christians, but in his case his inability to admit errors and accept responsibility for his mistakes, costs us dearly in debt, treasury, goodwill, inflation and blood.
"...as well as issuing death fatwa's for gays, prostitutes and liquor store vendors - well The Christian Coalition wishes they could do as much"
Naseem as an example of a mindset, like a zoo exhibit, I can understand. But is there some reason this snarling piece of garbage "Nariz" is still posting here? Most of his little screeds have nothing to do with jihad or islam, but are rather just polemics against Christians (particularily Catholics) and anything that smacks of Conservatism in his mean and addled little mind.
Why do we invest our time and money in these God-forsaken Islamic wastelands? How can anyone call Afghanistan and Iraq "democracies?" They are theocracies, plain and simple. The people of both nations went to the polls and voted to be governed by Islamic law. As I recall, they were offered no alternatives. We went to war for this? We're spending millions to rebuild schools just to have them burned down the next day? Women are free? Girls are being educated? Sure they are; they need plenty of schooling to prepare for marriage at ten or eleven to men old enough to be their great-grandfathers. How many Afghan muslims have been imported to America, just to make the "mosaic" more interesting? Their weddings will be especially fascinating, and nine year old Iranian brides will look exotic on the cover of Modern Bride. The diversicrats must be ecstatic and bursting with anticipation.
We would be better off with Saddam still in power. He was a tyrant, a butcher, and a fiend but he kept Iran in check; he had a secular government; he controlled the maniacal shi'ites; and posed no threat to us. Saddam murdered hundreds of thousands of people directly or indirectly, but how many casualties of "liberaton" are there, including our dead soldiers? Dozens die every day in Baghdad alone. The new president is a stauch supporter of Hezbollah and I thought Iraq was supposed to be an ally and friend to the U.S.
I am puzzled by Bush's insistence that if we left Afghanistan and Iraq, they would become terrorist havens and we would have to "fight the terrorists at home." That argument escapes me. We could fortify our borders and keep them out, or would the State Department feel obligated to give them visas? It would hardly matter if a few slipped into the country to join the thousands that are already here, thanks to the ineptitude and stupidity of the bureaucrats in charge. We'll be fighting them at home sooner or later anyway because it's a known fact that they're living all over America. I've never quite figured out why our government acknowledges that there are "known" terrorist cells here yet they make no move to dismantle them, arrest them, deport them. I guess they are bonafide American citizens, protected by the law and the ACLU until they martyr themselves, and then more of us will be dead and so will they.
The war on terror started out with some muscle and resolve, but it has turned into a poltically correct fiasco.
I guess he has not read the Afghan constitution. According to it, all such terms would be interpreted according to sharia.