Thank God the Taliban was toppled, but to think that all heinous practices in the country are going to be stopped in a handful of years is extremely naive.
Hopefully this man will be saved through various forms of International pressure. It's not Pres. Bush's responsibility to intervene in every case of injustice. It WAS his job to topple the Taliban for the US' sake...and he did it.
During WWII, Europe was more of less completely rid of fascism within 5 years of our involvement. High-explosives and lead work wonders in correcting this kind of behavior.
Bingo. Look, folks; I've been there recently, I've studied the country since 1980, and I occasionally teach Guard and Reserve servicemen going there what to expect, as what they call in DOD a Subject Matter Expert.
The UN had a list with 240-odd countries and regions on it, called in UN Development Index. When the TB took over Afghanistan, the country dropped off the list because the level of development was so low it could not be practically measured. Literacy, for instance, bottomed out at 3%, and after that nobody could find literate survey takers to go around and ask people if they could read.
There are few roads and they hadn't been touched for maintenance since the Russians left in 1989, and no railroad at all. Air transport? Forget it. the country was out of people who had the know-how to fix sturdy Russian jeeps, let alone jet mechanics. Half the population of Afghanistan were refugees in other countries, and half the refugees in the world were displaced Afghans.
Medical care? There were some qualified doctors, Afghans mostly, and nurses, but the Taliban hindered even them, and they had no supplies. Think about the medical treatment your own children have had and imagine living somewhere where there was no surgery, no antibiotics, no medical evacuation, no sterile conditions in the hospital. Children -- and adults -- die every day of diseases that are beaten in the civilized world. Hell, bearing a child, a woman was rolling a 9-sided die with one side labeled "you both perish."
I saw malnutrition that would make you cry, "5-year-olds" who turned out to be 9 and "70-year-olds" who turned out to be 35. I saw meningitis, tuberculosis, cholera, more parasites that I had ever imagined (EVERYBODY had worms), a distressed woman with the arm of a stillborn child hanging out of her, a beautiful little girl who had no arm thanks to a butterfly mine left by the Russians 20 years ago and still perfectly functional.
I saw a tough farmer with his foot swollen to basketball size with infection (we lanced the abscess after taking syringes of pus out, and it still shot into the medic's eye; but the man will live and walked again), and kid with an abscess in his cheek that let you see from outside in to his jawbone (we medevaced him, and got him back with a cross note from the surgeons that his case was too severe and required too much follow up).
I had old men weeping in joy that a particular taliban warlord had been taken from over them. I had widows demanding vengeance for their murdered husbands. I had two children come thirty miles on foot; we had PUC'd their father and they admitted he was a Taliban, but in our haste, we'd grabbed some family papers, including their birth certificates, which they needed now that a school was opening. (We managed to get back all the non-incriminating documents, almost the only time the MPs and interrogators ever responded to us).
The point of all this rant is that the country is more screwed up than Hogan's goat. The people, mostly, are hard-working, entrepreneurial, and interested in advancing their families rather than murdering their neighbours, for the first time in thirty-plus years.
But it's not the least bit surprising, when you think about it, that during the time that the liberal (relatively), internationally savvy Afghans were in exile or at war, the country descended under a veil of superstition and backwardness. IT WILL TAKE TIME for Afghans to absorb pluralistic values, and ramrodding them into their culture (as Russia did with its state religion, Communism) is not going to work.
Thank God the Taliban was toppled...
Indeed. An expression I have heard in Dari and Pushtu a lot ;)
... but to think that all heinous practices in the country are going to be stopped in a handful of years is extremely naive.
I agree.
My personal prediction on this is that the offending Christian will be sentenced to death by the court, and an apellate court or the executive will modify this to a sentence of exile so that they don't actually have to execute him. I doubt anybody actually wants to kill him -- Afghans have had enough killing to last for centuries.
Note that if this were happening in Saudi Arabia, the guy's head would be on the second bounce by now.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F